Speaking to a conference of the Association of Chief Police Officers in Belfast, Northern Ireland, Colombia’s Vice President, Francisco Santos appealed to drug users to forgo their habit in light of the severe environmental destruction that the cocaine trade is having in the Amazon Basin.

“If you snort a gram of cocaine, you are destroying 4m square of rainforest and that rainforest is not just Colombian – it belongs to all of us who live on this plant, so we should all be worried about it. Not only that, the money that you use to buy the cocaine goes into the hands of Farc, of illegal groups that plant mines, that kidnap, that kill, that use terrorism to protect their business.”

It’s worth a try. Perhaps the rain forest matters more than the thousands of Colombians who have lost their lives combating the drug trade. Cocaine consumption, while on the decline in the United States, is on an upswing in the European Union especially in the United Kingdom. Figures from the British Crime Survey this month suggested about 810,000 Britons had used cocaine in the last year. More on Santos’ comments in the UK Guardian.

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Count Ted Sorenson, Special Counsel and speech writer to JFK, among those who believe that President Clinton’s legacy is basically nil. No doubt, Reagan and even George W. Bush were more effective Presidents (that is that they succeeded in getting their agenda passed, not the effects because those have been a disaster without question ). Still Clinton’s Presidency shines despite his own personal failings if only in the art of the possible. There was a balance budget and a surplus, there was the the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP), a United States federal government program that gives funds to states in order to provide health insurance to families with children, and there were those 22.4 million new jobs created, the most ever by any Administration. Not bad for an Administration that left no legacy.

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Democrat and Anchorage Mayor Mark Begich has defeated convicted felon Ted Stevens in the Alaska Senate race. From the Associated Press:

Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens has lost his bid for a seventh term. The longest-serving Republican in the history of the Senate trailed Anchorage Mayor Mark Begich by 3,724 votes after Tuesday’s count. That’s an insurmountable lead with only about 2,500 overseas ballots left to be counted.

More from the New York Times and from the Anchorage Daily News. Mark Begich becomes the first Democratic Senator from Alaska since Mike Gravel. This also brings the Democrats net gain to seven in the Senate with results still pending in Minnesota and Georgia.

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Today in the Wall Street Journal, Bret Stephens writes that President Obama deserves a year of “political grace” but thereafter “it will become increasingly difficult to attribute whatever mistakes he makes to the legacy of his predecessor. American liberalism, such as it is, is finally being put to the test that fate has denied it these last many decades. Succeed or fail, this time there can be no excuses.”

Sorry but let’s get this straight at the onset, President-Elect Obama does not equal American liberalism nor is he the sum of all progressive dreams and hopes. Here’s the full op-ed:

I make no excuses, I only wear them.” Remember that? It was the pitch made by Donna Rice for a pair of tight-fitting stonewashed jeans some 20 years ago. Too bad the brand is long gone, since we’re at yet another No Excuses moment in American politics.

Specifically: a liberal No Excuses moment. With the election of Barack Obama and huge Democratic majorities in Congress, liberals must now practice something other than the politics of nostalgia and what-if.

This is a politics that has been in the making since at least 1968, though its real origins probably go back to 1944 and the first great liberal what-if: What if an ailing FDR had died nine months earlier, and been succeeded by the great progressive icon and polymath (and original moonbeam), then Vice President Henry Wallace?

In that case, perhaps, desegregation would have happened sooner, universal health care would be with us today, and the “century of fear” that Wallace predicted as the outcome of the Truman Doctrine would have been avoided by means of a more conciliatory policy toward the Soviet Union.

From that moment on, the liberal what-ifs multiply in dizzying profusion. What if John F. Kennedy had dodged the bullet in Dallas and lived to get the U.S. out of Vietnam before it fully got into it? What if Robert F. Kennedy had dodged the bullet in L.A. five years later? What if Jimmy Carter hadn’t been so earnest, truthful and unlucky? What if Ronald Reagan hadn’t proved such an adept political mythmaker? What if Donna Rice hadn’t been pictured on Gary Hart’s lap? What if Willie Horton hadn’t been given a furlough? What if Bill Clinton hadn’t squandered his political gifts with cheap trysts? What if Bush v. Gore had gone 5-4 the other way? What if 9/11 hadn’t intervened to give the Bush administration its mandate for another bout of the politics of fear? What if John Kerry hadn’t been sandbagged by Osama bin Laden’s last-minute video intervention?

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President-Elect Obama has decided to name Eric Holder as his Attorney General, putting the veteran Washington lawyer in place to become the first African-American to head the Justice Department. Holder is a veteran of Clinton White House where he served as Deputy Attorney General under Janet Reno from 1997 through 2001. He ran the day-to-day affairs of the DOJ and was also a Assistant Attorney General and a District Court Judge on the DC Circuit. Currently he is a senior partner at Covington & Burling in Washington DC. At Covington & Burling, Holder represented Chiquita Brands over their involvement with Colombian paramilitary forces and helped negotiate a deal with the Bush DOJ. Despite his ties to the Clintons, Holder was an early backer of Obama and most recently headed his Vice Presidential search committee alongside Caroline Kennedy.

Mr. Holder was involved in the decision to pardon fugitive Marc Rich. My understanding is that President Clinton phoned Mr. Holder on the morning of January 20, 2001 and asked his viewpoint.

One more centrist for the Cabinet. Woo-hoo!

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The good news out the last frontier is that Anchorage Mayor Mark Begich has widen his lead over incumbent and convicted felon Ted Stevens (somehow I don’t think I’ll ever tire of noting this) in the latest tally. Begich has 146,286 votes to Stevens’ 143,912 for a lead of 2,374. Whatever the results in Alaska, the Senate Republican Caucus should act and expel Senator Stevens immediately. Stevens is just the fifth sitting Senator to be convicted of a felony.

However, it appears that Stevens was spared a potentially critical vote by the Senate Republican Conference to expel him. Senator Jim DeMint, Republican of South Carolina, had intended to ask members of the conference to vote on such a resolution on Tuesday, released a statement today backing down.

“After talking with many of my colleagues, it’s clear there are sufficient votes to pass the resolution regarding Senator Stevens. The question now is timing. Some who support the resolution believe we should address this after the results of his election are confirmed in Alaska. For this reason, I will ask the conference to postpone the vote on Senator Stevens until Thursday.”

Somehow I am guessing that Senator DeMint was likely pressured by GOP leadership to back off and see if the voters of Alaska might excuse the Senators from an uncomfortable moment.

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From the San Francisco Chronicle:

‘Revolutionary suicide’

Three decades ago on Nov. 19, the Guyanese government dispatched troops to Jonestown, the agricultural settlement Jones and his followers had established in South America’s northeast corner. There they found the catastrophic result of Jones’ suicide order: More than 900 bodies lay scattered on the ground. About a third of the dead were under 18.

Jones had ordered his followers to kill themselves after Rep. Leo Ryan, D-San Mateo, visited the compound on a fact-finding trip and left with a group of Temple members who wanted to defect. For Jones, those defections were shattering. A Temple security squad followed Ryan’s group and fired on them, killing Ryan and four others.

When people recall Jonestown, they usually remember the suicides. They know less about the man. Jones was born in 1931 into a poor family in Lynn, Ind. He was the son of a disabled World War I veteran. By the 1950s he had become a pastor in Indianapolis, and in 1956, he opened his own church, Peoples Temple.

In the mid-1960s, Jones and more than 100 followers moved to Redwood Valley, about 125 miles north of San Francisco. In his sermons, Jones preached social justice and promised that he – “Dad” – would care for his people.

In 1972, Jones moved his church to an auditorium at Fillmore Street and Geary Boulevard in San Francisco. The city he settled in was in transition.

Manufacturing plants were moving out of town. Waves of Asian and Latino immigrants, along with gays and lesbians, were transforming areas that had been home to the working-class Irish and Italians. In the Fillmore District, affluent whites were buying homes that African Americans had owned or rented. In this city of the ’70s, Jones’ church attracted hundreds of new members.

It was an only-in-San Francisco phenomenon, said U.S. Attorney Joe Russoniello, who later successfully prosecuted Temple follower Larry Layton on conspiracy charges in connection with Ryan’s murder. “I don’t know of any other place in the country where Jones could have gone as far as he did,” Russoniello said.

In his church, Jones gave sermons advocating liberal ideals – pushing integration, attacking sexism, urging care for the poor. But behind the scenes, there was another, darker world: Jones, who was married, had many affairs with female and male followers and bragged about his conquests. He staged healing “miracles” by touching the ill and injured. And when church members committed relatively inconsequential misdeeds, such as not listening closely enough to Jones’ sermons, there were public beatings with a belt or paddle.

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