We’ll start with our own rebuttal written by Revere Blog contributor Aaliyah Henry.

I have to say, it is fascinating to see this author realize that the Left must move back to its former bulwark of “The Government Is Here to Tax and Spend on Your Behalf”. I say the Left’s former bulwark because the Left went so far left that it walked right off the reservation and found itself in no man’s land (excuse me, no person’s land) after being repudiated by the American electorate in the last political cycle.

For point of reference (and to add a bit of humor), you can consider the author of this article, Jeanne Whalen, a kind of sleeper agent of the left in that she came to The Wall Street Journal from The Washington Post. Her leftist credentials are well in order as she is self-proclaimed to be a “proud Washington Post alumna”, with tours of duty in strongholds such as New York City, Washington DC, and even Russia.

Expect to see significant retreats to the familiar territory of tax and spend so we can save you from yourself. We the ruling class, we who have never owned businesses nor ever had to be held accountable for each dollar we spend, we really must take your money so we can distribute it as it should be distributed.

It is not the purview of this comment to document how incredibly inefficient “tax and spend” is in the real world. It is the point of this comment to highlight that the Left’s propaganda machine is re-tooling. I commend this particular piece of work as being highly effective in trying to convince people that tax and spend is a great idea.

Next, we’ll highlight the most liked comment from the message section for the article. This paragraph was written by Michael Carlin

Unfortunately, while this all sounds good like seeding growth, we know from history that Government is not supposed to be a venture capitalist, lender or a hedge fund. The inflation created by these monster spending bills under Biden is crushing a large segment of the population who lives paycheck to paycheck. Who decides who gets the freebies? It should not be government workers who know nothing about the viability of investments.

Below is the article itself from the WSJ

Biden Leaves With an Uncertain Economic Legacy. Not So in This Indiana Town.

By Jeanne Whalen    Jan. 19, 2025 9:00 pm ET

The president leaves the stage Monday with dismal approval ratings and an uncertain legacy. But green shoots from his big initiatives are starting to pop—many in red states. Things have been looking up lately in Terre Haute, Ind., after recent decades had brought hard times.

• President Biden leaves office this week with a largely unpopular economic record. But Biden-backed legislation is fueling a surge in infrastructure investments.
• The investments are expected to have a lasting impact on Terre Haute, Ind., and other communities across the country.
• Republicans have blasted elements of the spending. But the American Rescue Plan Act and the Inflation Reduction Act have provided billions in funding for projects that are creating jobs.

TERRE HAUTE, Ind.—The mayor of this Rust Belt city is tracking so many infrastructure investments that he is running out of room on his whiteboard. There are new parks, sidewalks and housing units under construction. A giant factory is rising south of town and another is on the way.

The growth is some of the best this region has experienced in decades, much of it sparked by federal funding from President Biden-backed legislation. 

The Covid stimulus funding in the 2021 American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) gave Terre Haute about $34 million to plow into city improvements—a once-in-a-generation windfall for a community of 60,000 people. The 2022 Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) is providing more than $2 billion in loans and tax credits to two planned factories that will create more than 800 jobs. 

The funding “has done wonders for communities like Terre Haute,” said Mayor Brandon Sakbun, a 28-year-old Democrat and former Army Ranger who leads a sometimes blue-leaning city in a county and state that voted for Donald Trump. “A lot of Hoosiers and a lot of individuals might not realize just the true impact that several pieces of legislation have had.”

Mayor Brandon Sakbun says Terre Haute has benefited from federal funding from Biden-backed legislation.

Biden leaves office Monday with a largely unpopular economic record. Sharp inflation struck U.S. consumers like a lightning bolt soon after his election, causing swift spikes in grocery, housing and auto prices that helped force Biden out of the election. His approval rating has tanked to a dismal 36%.

The green shoots emerging in Terre Haute are another part of Biden’s legacy that will continue unfolding long after he is gone. 

The hundreds of billions of dollars that his legislative initiatives directed to infrastructure, manufacturing, green-energy projects and urban development are just now starting to take shape nationwide. The administration says the funding is supporting more than 74,000 infrastructure projects, factories and clean-energy ventures, with a big share going to red states and regions hard-hit by offshoring and globalization. 

“It will likely be beneficial to many places across the country looking back in a few years,” said Mark Muro, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who is tracking the investment. 

Some Republicans have blasted elements of the spending, saying that it unnecessarily pulls money from taxpayers at a time of soaring national deficits. Critics also say the funds sometimes go to corporations that might have been inclined to invest anyway. Even Sen. Bernie Sanders (I., Vt.) declined to support one law subsidizing computer-chip factories, calling it corporate welfare. 

Terre Haute got about $34 million for city improvements from Covid stimulus funding. It also got $2 billion in loans and tax credits for two planned factories.

Biden backed federal funding under four separate pieces of legislation: the Chips and Science Act and the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, ARPA and the IRA. Those programs were designed to bolster the nation’s roads, bridges and railroads and to help construct high-tech factories and energy infrastructure crucial to a modern economy. ARPA also directed $360 billion of stimulus funds to state and local governments during the pandemic, which many are spending on infrastructure, small-business development and other needs.

Many presidents don’t get quick credit for economic accomplishments that take a while to materialize. Some critics said the administration undermined its sales pitch by taking too long to disburse the money and failing to slap Biden’s name on more construction signs.

Still, an array of federal funding is starting to bear fruit in many parts of the country. 

Just one small slice of the IRA—expanded funding for a tax credit known as 48C—is helping to build dozens of new factories, including a planned battery-metal refinery in Ohio and a facility to recycle solar panels in Georgia. The administration’s award gusher continued last week with a $1.4 billion investment in computer-chip facilities in Arizona, Georgia and California. 

If a $1.6 billion loan guarantee gets final approval, it would create 500 construction jobs and about 150 permanent jobs in a new factory on this site.

“It will take time to feel the full impact of all we’ve done together. But the seeds are planted,” Biden said in a speech last week.

Perched on the banks of the Wabash River in western Indiana, Terre Haute rose as a manufacturing hub in the late 19th century, cranking out everything from iron to Clabber Girl baking powder. Author Theodore Dreiser was born in town, and Larry Bird played for Indiana State University here in the 1970s. Recent decades brought hard times, including the same plant closures and population decline that have plagued many manufacturing communities. Terre Haute’s median household income of $42,000 is well below Indiana’s of $70,000. 

What will be the legacy of President Biden’s economic policies? Join the conversation below.

But lately, things have been looking up. Driving through town on a recent afternoon, Mayor Sakbun showed off several clusters of housing construction spurred by ARPA funds that are paying for sewer, water and electricity lines. The funding helped developers start or finish construction of 450 homes last year, compared with 120 or so in years past, a pace the city hopes to maintain. Some investors are also using the funds to rehab properties that have stood vacant for decades. 

New ARPA-funded pedestrian bridges are planned to connect hotels to a small convention center. Indiana State University is using ARPA money to enlarge a child-care facility. Another local college, St. Mary-of-the-Woods, received funds to expand its equine-studies program, including renovating an arena for horse shows to attract tourism. 

This housing construction is among several clusters in Terre Haute spurred by American Rescue Plan Act funding.

Charlie’s Pub & Grub, a decades-old institution, is one of two dozen small businesses to receive ARPA-funded grants from the city and United Way. Owners Nikki and Cheyne O’Laughlin plan to use the $70,000 to install a new roof and awning on the restaurant. “Charlie’s is in a lower-income neighborhood off the beaten path, just on a side street, so it was very exciting for us to get something,” Nikki O’Laughlin said after wrapping up the lunch shift. Without the grant, the O’Laughlins would have replaced the leaking roof in stages or maybe taken out a bank loan, they said. 

Much larger projects are rising on the outskirts of town. Entek, an Oregon-based company that makes parts for lithium-ion batteries, is building a $1.8 billion factory supported by a $1.2 billion loan from an Energy Department program that got new funding from the IRA. The investment is one of the largest the area has ever received, and the planned 650 jobs will make the plant one of the biggest employers in town.

Kim Medford, president of Entek’s manufacturing division, called the low-cost loan “crucial” to the project, saying it helps make the venture more competitive with overseas rivals. “We would have had to come up with a different financing strategy for sure without the loan,” Medford said.

Cheyne, left, and Nikki O’Laughlin received a federally funded grant for one of the two local restaurants they own.

A big aim of the IRA was to create new jobs in coal communities as the country transitions to cleaner sources of energy. Terre Haute sits above a historic coal-mining region that has suffered amid declining demand. 

Just north of town, Wabash Valley Resources is awaiting a $1.6 billion IRA-funded loan guarantee to turn the site of a former coal-fired power plant into a factory to make ammonia for fertilizer. Traditional ammonia production emits harmful greenhouse gases, but the Terre Haute project aims to trap its CO2 emissions and bury them underground, a cleaner approach known as carbon sequestration that the Biden administration has been eager to support.

The project will create 500 construction jobs and about 150 permanent jobs with an average base salary of about $100,000 a year, the company said. 

Having dinner at the Terminal Public House restaurant downtown, also owned by the O’Laughlins, Jack Deckard said he was aware that the new factories are receiving federal funding but wasn’t certain from which legislation. The 41-year-old, who works for a company that lends construction equipment, said he is hopeful that the projects will help keep young college graduates from leaving town. 

“If all your talented and educated people leave,” he said, “what’s that leave you with?”

You can also listen to the interview here:

Gail Alfar provided a summary of the interview on X which can be found by clicking the post below.

Elon Musk spoke to Gad Saad in a video-hosted space today.

by Gail Alfar, Austin, Texas

Here's the take-away:

BOOKS
Elon suggested that listening to an audiobook at bedtime is a great way to end the day and fall asleep.

We certainly agree! There are a lot of great books on… pic.twitter.com/quBHsUqvj5

— The Elon Musk Book Club (@elonmuskbooks) March 17, 2024

——————–

Blackouts will trigger a people’s revolt against the new eco-tyranny Green policies are popular in theory, but can only be sustained if they don’t threaten our quality of life

By Allister Heath in The Telegraph (UK) … December 7, 2022

Winter is upon us, courtesy of the Arctic blast unleashed by the Troll from Trondheim. We will soon find out whether we can keep the lights and heating on, or whether Britain is about to be plunged into a nightmare of energy rationing, rolling blackouts, three-day weeks and untold human misery.

The proximate cause of our present crisis is Vladimir Putin’s despicable invasion of Ukraine, and the resultant reduction in global gas supplies. Yet the Government must shoulder its share of the blame: it prioritised reducing carbon emissions above all else, and neglected keeping prices low or ensuring availability and security of supplies. This winter may turn out to be a dry run for a much greater, self-inflicted disaster, a harbinger of a new normal of permanently insufficient, costly energy supplies that could jeopardise our way of life, upend our politics and trigger a popular rebellion.

We are nearing a turning point for democratic support for environmentalism. Gordon Brown’s 2008 Climate Change Act legislated to slash CO2 emissions by 80 per cent by 2050, a seismic shift pushed through with little debate but much superficial public approval. Theresa May strengthened this to 100 per cent by 2050, the “net zero” target; again, the public liked the sound of this, if not of Mrs May. China will continue to increase its emissions by more than we cut ours, but our entire ruling class has signed up to this iron-clad legal framework, with no dissent tolerated.

Thanks to technology and markets, it ought to be possible to decarbonise without ruining our society and economy, but 14 years on the revolution is proceeding just about as disastrously as anybody could have imagined. In typical British fashion, our political class has taken all the easy decisions first, and none of the tough ones. The blunders, the groupthink, the demented short-termism and the mind-boggling bureaucratic incompetence have amounted to one of the greatest national scandals of the past few decades.

It’s easy to stop extracting fossil fuels or to boast about the decline of our carbon-emitting manufacturing sector, especially when we simply switch to importing goods, oil and gas from abroad, congratulating ourselves on our brilliance. We didn’t bother to construct gas-storage facilities or stress-test supply chains for geopolitical risk. We built offshore wind farms and solar but Britain also needed its own Pierre Messmer, the Gaullist who launched France’s huge nuclear program. Instead, we got Nick Clegg: in a humiliating video from 2010, he rejects increasing nuclear capacity because it would have taken until 2021 or 2022 to come online.

The real world consequences are catastrophic. When the wind stops blowing and the solar panels are covered in snow, when all our cars are electric and boilers replaced by heat pumps, where will energy come from? Demand for electricity will surge, but there won’t be enough supply. The grid will implode. It may one day be possible to store electricity in giant batteries, but not today. Public rage if and when it all goes wrong will make Brexit look like a walk in the park.

Rishi Sunak’s plans are laughably modest: we are now so far behind any rational transition schedule that only an extreme effort, a Manhattan Project for nuclear power, can possibly rescue us from disaster. HS2 should be halted, and its billions urgently diverted to building nuclear power plants.

Political parties have been lulled into a false sense of complacency: the public want to be greener, but not at the cost of suffering extreme material regression. Voters are worried about climate change and wish to decarbonise, but only a tiny minority are fully paid-up to the most extreme, fanatical, anti-human, anti-capitalist version of the environmentalist doctrine. Human nature hasn’t suddenly changed: we still want to enjoy economic growth, to live better, longer, richer lives. We want to own goods and travel freely. Few of us want to be poor and cold and miserable. We don’t aspire to return to a feudal lifestyle, with our overlords dictating how we can live our lives.

Until now, green virtue has come easily and cheaply. Everybody hates littering and waste. It’s not hard to recycle, or to shift to reusable bags. It’s a different matter when people begin to be truly inconvenienced (idiots sitting down on motorways) or forced to buy expensive new cars: the anger is immediate. Wait until voters are told they can’t fly to Spain, that meat will be taxed, or that power cuts will be the new normal to comply with net zero: there will be a populist explosion.

Politicians everywhere are over-reaching, having drawn an incorrect lesson from Covid, namely that we will be willing to give up on our jobs, prosperity and freedoms in the name of a climate emergency. Germany faces crippling deindustrialisation, to great angst. The Dutch are nationalising and shutting “polluting” farms, triggering widespread fury. Switzerland’s winter contingency plans are modelled on lockdowns. Electric cars would be banned from non-essential journeys, shop hours cut and streaming services downgraded; sports matches, concerts and theatres could be cancelled.

The public might wear this once because of Ukraine, but it won’t tolerate intermittent energy becoming the norm. In typically condescending fashion, France’s plans are described as délestage – load shedding, getting rid of ballast, of “non-essential” energy users – as if bankrupting businesses were obviously necessary for the common good. We are halfway along F A Hayek’s Road to Serfdom.

So why this new snobbery? One answer can be gleaned from another visionary dystopian classic, Michael Young’s The Rise of the Meritocracy. A side effect of individualistic meritocracy, which I otherwise support, is that those who rise to the top become entitled and look down upon everybody else. As Young put it, “by imperceptible degrees an aristocracy of birth has turned into an aristocracy of talent”. The result is the return of anti-capitalist, neo-feudal attitudes: the elites nudge and compel the masses to do what is good for them, safe in the knowledge that the powerful will retain their privileges, their exclusive “Zil” traffic lanes, their private jets.

It won’t wash. The politicians have a choice: make greenery consumer-friendly, harnessing technology to preserve the public’s quality of life, or face a calamitous democratic uprising.

Pastor Ed Young, October 24, 2021:

If I took a poll and asked this worshipping family… “Are we in a crisis in our culture in our America?” I think they would be unanimity: Absolutely! Wherever you turn there is an SOS. 

But I think if you went to the White House or to Washington and asked the same question… “Are we in a crisis?” … They would say absolutely not! This is becoming America’s Finest Hour. Lenin would be pleased. George Soros is pleased. Saul Alinsky would be pleased. Karl Marx would be thrilled to death.

Because ladies and gentlemen we need to understand something. And a lot of those in the halls of Congress don’t get it. A lot of our commentators don’t get it. The idea “Man, don’t they know, don’t they understand, don’t they see what’s happening here and here and here?”

Sure! They know exactly what happens because if you wrote down a prescription and say “What has happened throughout history when a revolution is taking place, what has to take place first?”

And they have a checklist and as far as I can determine every standard is being addressed. You can take any one avenue of that. 

Take the thing of the police. Those who protect us:

• Defund them. Cut down the number. Do not give them the backing of the county, city, government so they can do their job to protect us. 

What would be that motivation for the exploration, the explosion of crime in every area of America today? Why would anyone want that? 

One reason: So that the state would have to come and bail out i.e.  Chicago. Because obviously they cannot take care of their population as they are. So it is the total replacement of the local, the city, the county, the state by the Federal who comes in and now everything comes from the top down. 

The whole agenda, as I’ve said repeatedly, is to take America, a nation under God, and make it a nation under the State. 

And that is the whole process of [this] revolution. And the tragedy is that 5% of the population who is militant and committed to destruction and remapping and reconstituting a nation, 5% who are committed and militant and have really no moral standards, can totally change a country if the other 90 or 95% are like ostriches. And an ostrich puts its head in the sand.

Yes, it’s an ad for wine, but my goodness, what an ad. We love it.

“Ideological homogeneity in the media risks repressing certain ideas from the public consciousness just as surely as if access were restricted by the government.”

Judge Laurence Silberman
March 19, 2021