This evening's music features folk and blues musician Huddie "Lead Belly" Ledbetter.

Here are some stories from tonight's post:

The Parties’ Role Reversal on ‘Interfering’ with the Commander-in-Chief’s Foreign Policy

Senate Republicans, obsessed as always with carrying out the agenda of the Israeli government and leading the U.S. into more militarism and war, yesterday wrote a letter to “the leaders of the Islamic Republic of Iran” designed to derail an international agreement governing that country’s nuclear program. Numerous leading Democrats – in Congress and the media – are today using the language of criminality, sedition and even treason to denounce that letter, insisting that it is a violation of American “norms” and possibly American law for members of Congress to “undermine” the President’s conduct of foreign policy and diplomacy. ...

To see how thoroughly Democrats have adopted the GOP’s Bush-era authoritarian rhetoric about not “undermining the commander-in-chief,” and to see how craven is GOP behavior now on Iran, just look at what was being said in 2007 when then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi traveled to Syria and met with President Bashar Assad. The Bush administration was furious about that meeting because its strategy at the time was to isolate Assad as punishment for his alleged aid to Iraqi insurgents fighting against U.S. occupying forces, and the right-wing media and even mainstream media precincts attacked Pelosi in ways quite redolent of today’s attacks on the Senate Republicans over Iran. ...

Dick Cheney called Pelosi’s trip “bad behavior” and said in an interview with Rush Limbaugh: “The president is the one who conducts foreign policy, not the speaker of the House.” Writing in National Review, then-Minority Whip Eric Cantor complained that “Mrs. Pelosi usurped the executive branch’s time-honored foreign-policy authority”; “at such a critical moment in the volatile Middle East,” he inveighed, “this is no time for the United States to be sending out mixed signals to our enemies.” The right-wing extremist Congressman Steve King actually introduced legislation to bar Pelosi from traveling to “terrorist states.” ...

The GOP reaction was even more strident when then-Congressman Dennis Kucinich criticized the Iraq War on Middle East television in 2007 after meeting with Assad. About that controversy, the Cleveland Plain Dealer reported that “words like ‘traitor’ and ‘treason’ have been liberally bandied about on television and talk radio,” and it quoted Republican Peter King as saying this on Fox News: “You cannot have American congressmen, American senators going overseas to an enemy, which Syria is, and denouncing our policies.”

For their part, Democrats, needless to say, thought it was perfectly legitimate for members of Congress to act in opposition to Bush’s foreign policy. In Salon, Joe Conason mocked “the screaming critics of the speaker [who] charge her with undermining presidential power [and] freelancing Mideast diplomacy,” insisting that “those furious complaints were all false and, more important, beside the point.” He said that Republicans “can only smear those who, like Speaker Pelosi, are attempting to promote a bipartisan alternative” and concluded: “Let us hope she possesses the courage to continue that crucial mission.”

Still, the reason I so vividly remember the 2007 controversy over the Pelosi trip is because it was part of this constant Bush-era effort to demand that the President was the sole authority on foreign policy, and that attempts by members of Congress to “interfere” with his actions were illegitimate, possibly illegal, and likely treasonous, because few things are worse than, as Joe Lieberman put it, undermining the Commander-in-Chief (and just by the way, if you’re a citizen who is not in the military, the President is not your “Commander-in-Chief”). ... That mentality and rhetoric are no less offensive when used by Democrats today than it was when it was being spewed by Republicans for the entire Bush presidency. And the “treason” rhetoric now being spouted by Democrats is part of a broader embrace by many of them in the Obama era of the worst rhetorical excesses of Bush-era Republicans.

Obama absurdly declares Venezuela a security threat

Channeling Reagan, Obama continues US pressure on Latin American leftist governments

Yesterday the White House took a new step toward the theater of the absurd by “declaring a national emergency with respect to the unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States posed by the situation in Venezuela,” as President Barack Obama put it in a letter to House Speaker John Boehner.

It remains to be seen whether anyone in the White House press corps will have the courage to ask what in the world the nation’s chief executive could mean by that. Is Venezuela financing a coming terrorist attack on U.S. territory? Planning an invasion? Building a nuclear weapon?

Who do they think they are kidding? Some may say that the language is just there because it is necessary under U.S. law in order to impose the latest round of sanctions on Venezuela. That is not much of a defense, telling the whole world the rule of law in the United States is something the president can use lies to get around whenever he finds it inconvenient. ...

The Venezuelan government has produced some credible evidence of a coup in the making: the recording of a former deputy minister of the interior reading what is obviously a communique to be issued after the military deposes the elected government, the confessions of some accused military officers and a recorded phone conversation between opposition leaders acknowledging that a coup is in the works.

Regardless of whether one thinks this evidence is sufficient (the U.S. press has not reported most of it), it is little wonder that the governments in the region are convinced. Efforts to overthrow the democratically elected government of Venezuela have been underway for most of the past 15 years. ... The face of Washington in Latin America is one of extremism. Despite some changes in other areas of foreign policy (e.g., Obama’s engagement with Iran), this face has not changed very much since Reagan warned us that Nicaragua’s Sandinistas “were just two days’ driving time from Harlingen, Texas.” He was ridiculed by Garry Trudeau in “Doonesbury” and other satirists. The Obama White House’s Reagan redux should get the same treatment.

Mearsheimer: US democracy promotion means toppling govts

Booming U.S. Renewable Energy Sector Growing Faster Than Expected

The mainstreaming of renewable energy is happening even faster than projected.

According to the latest “Electric Power Monthly” report from the U.S. Energy Information Administration, which includes data through the end of 2014, some 13.91% of electricity generation in the U.S. last year was from renewable sources.

“Given current growth rates, especially for solar and wind, it is quite possible that renewable energy sources will reach, or exceed, 14% of the nation's electrical supply by the end of 2015,” noted Ken Bossong, executive director of the SUN DAY Campaign. “That is a level that EIA, only a few years ago, was forecasting would not be achieved until the year 2040.”

Wind energy continues to be the biggest clean energy source by far, supplying some 4.45% of 2014 electricity generation in the U.S. versus .45% from solar and .41% from geothermal. But solar is making great strides, seeing more than 100% growth last year while wind grew just 8.3% and geothermal by just 5.4%.

Coal and nuclear energy grew by .3% and 1%, respectively, while natural gas actually dropped, as did hydropower.

The EIA does not fully track rooftop solar energy generation, so these numbers understate solar’s contribution to the U.S. energy mix. According to the Solar Energy Industries Association, there are nearly 600,000 homes and businesses generating their own energy through solar