Via the traitor Steve Clemons, I see the appeasement set over at the Council on Foreign Relations has released a new report on approaches to Latin America that calls for rethinking our policy toward Cuba. What nonsense, we’ve been embargoing them for only around 50 years and just this year it’s finally bearing fruit in the form of age taking its toll on Fidel Castro. If we just keep on doing the same thing for another 100 or so years, surely it’ll work by then.

Meanwhile, the Miami Herald thinks the rigid politics of Cuba policy may finally be shifting.

A lot of attention focused yesterday on John McCain’s audaciously hopeful plan to win the war in Iraq though the power of positive thinking, but if you bore down into his speech you see that vague aspirations are actually going to accomplish all sorts of wonderful stuff by 2013.

John Boonstra, for example, is confused about McCain’s plan for a coalition of countries with no leverage over Sudan to successfully pressure Sudan into resolving the conflict in Darfur. What he’s not considering is that McCain would really like this to happen and would like to emphasize that it’d be really great if it worked.

Kevin Drum looks at the trendlines in growing support for gay rights and concludes that a gay marriage referendum in California is likely to be a close-run thing. But of course whatever happens this November, this is essentially a fight the right has already lost. Individuals’ views are evolving in a more pro-equality direction, but perhaps more importantly pure cohort replacement effects doom the conservative position on gay rights questions with equality enjoying overwhelming support among younger Americans.

And then of course there’s the Ellen DeGeneres factor, as these days an openly lesbian woman can regularly attract a large audience of very middlebrow people and announce her engagement to a cheering studio audience.

Tom Lee has some more background on software patents, for those of you who seem to think these are a good idea. Remember that, yes, stronger IP protections create larger financial incentives to innovate. But they also make it more expensive to innovate and ultimately reduce the level of competition. You can already copyright your software so people can’t just go and copy what you’ve done.

Adding a layer of patent protection on top of that makes life too difficult for programmers (who don’t know what they’re allowed to do and may not be able to afford to do it) and too comfortable for incumbents.

Interesting post from Dana Goldstein:

An interesting question raised at the Ed in ’08 conference: The idea of universal pre-school (in other words, affordable for everyone) isn’t very controversial, unlike the idea of universal health care. But should pre-school be mandated? In other words, should we be requiring that all three and four-year-olds be enrolled in some kind of education program, even if it’s “home schooling?”

On requiring, probably not. What I think this analogy does is highlight the distortions on our thinking forced by the health policy community’s determination to find a way of reforming the health care system that involves appeasing the insurance companies rather than destroying them. In a rational and humane universe, health insurance wouldn’t be universal. It’d be kinda rare. Something very rich people or the idiosyncratically risk averse paid for out of pocket. What would be universal would be health care. And as with universal preschool, the existence of universal health care wouldn’t imply that at any given time every single person was actually receiving health care. Nor would it quite guarantee that everyone was actually receiving all the health care they need — ornery people might just not go to the doctor.

Rather, the promise of universal health care would be that, as with the promise of universal preschool, the care would be provided to anyone who wanted it at a price that everyone could afford.

But if you want to keep the insurance companies in business, then you’re looking at a different picture. Barack Obama has a plan to make health insurance affordable for every American. But many analysts think that a program like that is fundamentally unworkable unless you require that everybody buy health insurance. The problem is that there’s a difference between only showing up to get your health care when you find yourself in need of care (that’s normal!) and only showing up to get your health insurance when you find yourself in need of care (that’s against the whole concept of insurance). Then, of course, once you decide on a mandate your problem because enforcement. But this mostly serves to underscore the fact that the compromises being made in terms of trying to create a realistic legislative package for 2009 are very real compromises, major steps away from ideal circumstances that introduce unnecessary complications into the system.

Photo by Flickr user Ninjapoodles used under a Creative Commons license