10 Thoughts for May 19, 2014

1. AT&T wants to buy out DirectTV -- assuming the FCC and the DOJ approve.  Not content on expanding U-Verse, they're looking to consolidate half of the satellite TV market with their share of the fiber optic market.  This comes on the heels of Comcast trying to buy out TWC to concentrate cable market share.  It makes you wonder, therefore, if Google Fiber's big expansion plans have anything to do with this; are these old monopolists under threat and therefore responding by increasing leverage?
2. Speaking of Google Fiber, it looks like all of the cities on their expansion list have submitted and completed the first part of the application.  I got that email last week saying that the City of Portland had submitted their checklist response.  Some things apparently got by the wayside, but the May 1 deadline wasn't a hard one.
3. Having read the opposition to Google Fiber by some folks, I fear a repeat of the Trader Joe's fiasco in North Portland.  All it takes is for a small handful of vocal opposition to screw up the process and detrimentally affect all of us.  Look at what happened to the affluent suburb of Overland Park, KS. Which by the way, explains why Seattle didn't make the cut list, and might never make it.  Some people just can't help but look a gift horse in the mouth.
4. It would be ironic if it turns out that the Portland style gentrification allows once-poor neighborhoods to qualify for free 5Mbps internet for everyone including the poor.  With heavily mixed-income, high-density neighborhoods, surely almost all will qualify.  Now, all we need to do is solve the lack of computing devices issue.  I humbly suggest refurbished Chromebooks.
5. I hope people watched the first part of PBS Frontline's United States of Secrets...very good stuff in there.  Part II is this Tuesday, May 20th.
6. The Right has misplaced intentions by attacking Hillary Clinton, especially this early.  Not only does it exhibit weakness (by going on the offensive a whole two years ahead of the primaries), but it also reflects shortsightedness.  She was the odds-on favorite right up until Obama gained traction in the primaries.  I suspect the next Democratic nominee will be someone other than Hillary.  I can think of a half-dozen candidates who'll re-energize the base.
7. I'd been building on a thesis of why this year's early predictions of a GOP takeover in the Senate was misplaced.  As I was searching for data, one part of the thesis fell apart while a completely different portion took hold.  It's quite interesting and I think it plays a key role into understanding why the GOP may lose seats in the 2014 general election, rather than take over.  I was in the process of writing it up, but I sort of lost interest -- no point in writing about it before the primaries have ended and we've gotten a month of polling data to chew on.  For now, I'll just say that the key appears to be the trend of party-affiliation, including registered independents.  The approval rating of Congress registers a cognitive bias and cannot be taken at face value.
8. You know, Vladimir Putin has once again stated that Russian troops are being pulled back from the Ukrainian border.  That should make most people laugh cynically, after all, how many times can you pull back from the same position that you'd previously said you weren't in?  This is how Putin has played it so far:
1. We don't have troops at the border.
2. We don't have troops at the border.
3. I never said we didn't have troops at the border; of course we have troops at the border.
4. We'll pull back the troops.
5. We'll pull back the troops.
9. FWIW, I voted 10 years ago against the Oregon constitutional ban on same-sex marriage.  It just never seemed to me to make sense that the state (and generally people) had any right to dictate that marriage be limited by the gender of your spouse.  I understand any given religion's right to be against same-sex marriage, but it does not provide any given religion the power to dictate that all people within and without must abide by their beliefs.  That's where the Establishment Clause comes to bear, I suspect.  The reason for commenting about this, is that the Oregon Supreme Court US District Court in Eugene is expected to throw out the ban in a couple of hours, following the SCOTUS ruling last year throwing out DOMA.  (Update: Done.) (Update 2: Emergency stay denied.)
10. This sort of stuff keeps coming up, pointing to the reality that racism is alive and well in the United States.