☕️ CRYING UNCLE ☙ Wednesday, August 27, 2025 ☙ C&C NEWS 🦠

Disturbing infant mortality trend blinds experts; NYT whine over Cabinet Q&A; Kennedy shakes autism debate; Tulsi hints disclosures; Lutnick finds revenue; tariffs soar; Cracker Barrel retreats.

Good morning, C&C, it’s Wednesday! Even though we begin with a troubling story, it’s all good news from there. In today’s roundup: disturbing infant mortality trend provokes expert blindness but we offer suggestions; New York Times finds many opportunities for improvement in Trump’s seventh live Cabinet meeting in seven months; Kennedy drops a bomb on the autism debate; Gabbard teases more burn bags and disclosures forthcoming; Lutnick outlines more surprising passive revenue streams for taxpayers; Bessent reports tariffs blowing through the roof; Cracker Barrel sudden logo retreat after Trump offers sage advice; and ICE-dodging Wisconsin judge loses bid to dismiss her case, and now she’ll get her day in court.

🌍 WORLD NEWS AND COMMENTARY 🌍

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On Monday, Time Magazine ran a very troubling story headlined, “Infant Deaths Spur Public Health Emergency in Mississippi.”

Scientists are baffled again. In Mississippi last year, nearly ten babies out of every 1,000 died, double the national average. Despite —or perhaps because of— our massive health spending and giant public health bureaucracies, the US ‘enjoys’ the highest infant mortality rate of any wealthy country. We’re on par with Nigeria, Zimbabwe, and similar godforsaken places.

The official notice on the state’s website coolly identified four “leading causes:” birth defects, premature deliveries, underweight babies, and sudden infant death syndrome. But those aren’t actually causes, are they? Birth defects don’t cause birth defects. That grim index merely tallies the terrifying outcomes of some other unnamed causal mechanism.

The story orphaned its most important and terrifying statistic midway through the article: “Between 2023 and 2024, infant mortality rates worsened in 24 states, including Arkansas and Louisiana, Warren says. ‘This is reflective of a large trend.’”

A trend, you say? What could be causing this horrible national trend, which began sometime during the last four years? Could it be … experts? Behold, yesterday:

I really don’t understand why I must do everything for these moronic experts. It’s like they’re not even trying. It only took me a few minutes of googling to find the CDC’s July, 2024 report on infant mortality, which described how mortality rates were steadily dropping since the 1990’s, until sometime recently, and even included this eye-popping but very helpful graph:

In other words —and this should have been the story— A quarter century of steady national progress in saving infants suddenly reversed, and now half the country’s states are reporting rising deaths.

Maybe some expert should ask the obvious question: what changed in 2021-2022?

💉 But never mind. They looked right past that chart. Neither the article or the state’s notice mentioned anything about the trend’s timing. As for proposed solutions, Mississippi and the credulous media both invoked the classic shibboleth: we need to spend more money on healthcare.

But why? We’ve been told we must always follow the science. So where are the peer-reviewed studies proving improved outcomes track with higher health spending? Mississippi already spends more per capita on healthcare than most countries with better infant survival rates. The U.S. as a whole pours trillions into healthcare annually, yet infant and maternal mortality are marching in the wrong direction.

Indeed, the best and most recent studies show diminishing returns from additional health spending on infant and maternal care. One 2024 Lancet study observed that, whereas boosting budgets in godawful third-world countries produces reliable improvements, “at levels of annual spending above approximately US$500 per capita, these returns start to slow. At levels of spending above those seen in high-income countries such as Italy (approximately US$3400), there is little or no evidence of further health returns to additional spending.”

The US currently spends about $12,000 per capita on healthcare. The returns have diminished so far that you’d need an electron microscope to find them.

💉 The maddening reality is that they all ignored the obvious next step: instead of defying science and spending more on healthcare, they should be spending more on researching the actual cause. Viewed cynically, it’s almost like they don’t want to know what could be causing a sudden surge in infant mortality in 24 states.

Maybe we should look backwards, rather than forwards, for solutions. America used to know just how to handle offending officials.

In 1774, Boston customs officer John Malcolm was famously tarred, feathered, and ridden out of town on a rail after striking a boy and sneering at a crowd. His ordeal was described in detail in newspapers of the time and in his own (quite bitter) petitions to Parliament. In 1800’s frontier towns, local histories record corrupt judges, con men, and land speculators being “railed out.” Often, town meeting minutes, diaries, and newspapers draped the malefactors with scathing ridicule.

In 1913, fifteen women in Volo, Illinois “railed” Minnie Schultz Richardson, for having, um, relations with her brother-in-law, and in doing so, leaving her poor, disabled husband uncared-for at home. They unceremoniously dumped her outside the town limits in a mud patch and told her not to come back. Taking out the trash.

When 24 states at once start burying more babies, the scandal isn’t just the deaths — it’s the silence about what changed to make it happen. My prescription: Tar. Feathers. Rails. Or maybe something even stricter, to make sure they won’t forget. We gave the credentialed mandarins power, authority, and room to maneuver— and not only did they blow it, but now they’re trying to brazen through by blaming it on our lifestyle choices.

Give Mississippi credit for declaring a state of emergency. But the real emergency is national. And we have a pretty good idea where to start looking.

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Remember President No-Cognition’s idea of “press availability”? A fifteen-minute buffet of stage-managed note cards before calling a lid and promising “we’ll circle back.” Contrast that with President Trump yesterday: a three-hour open Cabinet meeting —the seventh one— in a live broadcast, capped off by an extended Q&A wherein reporters tried every trick in the book to wring a gaffe while Trump answered patiently. In the long, deplorable annals of deranged dissatisfaction, the New York Times must deserve the prize for hardest to please. Here’s how the Times framed it: “Trump Plays Reality Television Host at Marathon Cabinet Meeting.”

It was too long! That was just the beginning of the Grey Lady’s finicky fault-finding. Here are a few other complaints, and I am not making them up:

• The President failed to adequately address the day’s most important news— Taylor Swift’s engagement (“Mr. Trump had relatively little to say about what was arguably the biggest news of the day”).

• The Cabinet members complimented the President too often (“each working a little bit harder than the last to offer Mr. Trump praise”).

• It was a waste of money (“it would be considered a wildly inefficient meeting at just about any other workplace”).

Cue massive eye rolling. The Times spent the whole article sanctimoniously sneering at Trump for staging a “reality TV show”, but then admitted, almost wistfully: “but for an afternoon, the Trump White House really was as radically transparent as Mr. Trump likes to say it is.”

Of course, it also ignored every bit of real news that emerged. Let’s round up a few, shall we?

🔥 The Times may be blinded by TDS, but the Hill recognized the real biggest news of the day. It ran that mammoth story under the headline, “RFK Jr. says agency will reveal causes of autism in September.” That should have been the show-stopper.

CLIP: Kennedy drops autism bombshell (2:39).

President Trump asked Kennedy for a progress update, and the new HHS Secretary replied, “We will have announcements as promised in September, finding certain interventions are clearly —almost certainly— causing autism.”

Trump (pretending he doesn’t already know) then remarked, “So, there has to be something artificially causing this, meaning a drug or something. And I know you’re looking very strongly at different things, and I hope you can come out with that as soon as possible.”

Of the exchange, the Times only reported that the two men discussed autism, “allowing the president to wonder aloud if there was ‘something artificially causing this.’” It definitely did not mention that Kennedy announced he’d found the cause, which was even bigger news than the size of Taylor Swift’s engagement ring.

You should see the deranged tweets the vaccine pushers have been posting ever since.

If Trump and Kennedy solve the autism crisis, that alone would guarantee their spots in history.

🔥 Trump, in another obvious setup question, asked Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard about the “burn bags of information having to do with how corrupt the 2020 election was— when will that come out?” Gabbard replied, “we are finding documents, literally tucked away in the back of safes in random offices, in these bags and in other areas.”

CLIP: Tulsi Gabbard teases more burn bags being found in random offices (0:54).

It’s like a deep state scavenger hunt! Bottom line— more disclosures are definitely coming.

And— how hilarious is it that the deep staters trusted each other so little that they all kept the burn bags instead of incinerating them? I can’t wait for the movie.

🔥 Colorful Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick dropped another bombshell, this one on the academic-industrial complex. “Patents!” he exclaimed. “We have given tens of billions, if not hundreds of billions, to universities for them to do research and invent things. You know who owns the patents? The universities. So we are going to make a deal with them all: if we give them the money, the United States and the taxpayers get a piece of that.”

CLIP: Commerce Secretary Lutnick updates Trump on the next big revenue source (0:57).

“It is so much fun to work here,” Lutnick enthused. “We just have a blast! Linda’s hitting Harvard; now we send them a patent letter, and hit ‘em again. I’m having the time of my life working for you.” He sounded like an enthusiastic Harrison Ford gushing at the start of a Raiders of the Lost Ark expedition.

Lutnick’s promise was news dynamite. For decades, the Bayh–Dole Act has let universities hoard patents from government-funded research — effectively privatizing profits from taxpayer subsidies. Lutnick just swung a sledgehammer at one of the most sacred cows in the swamp: federally funded university research that magically turns into vast, private university patent portfolios.

They must be terrified. Harvard, MIT, Stanford, and all the rest suddenly face the nightmare scenario of having to share their licensing gravy train with taxpayers. It also blows a hole in their moral shield — the scam, which progressives always fall for, that “we’re just doing noble research.”

No. They’ve been running a massive commercialization scheme subsidized by the public. They now have the option of funding their own research, so they won’t have to share, if they want.

Think about all this: The swamp spent decades telling us government was broke, strapped, nothing left but IOUs and future tax increases. Turns out, the couch just needed a shake — and Trump’s team keep finding new revenue streams buried under the cushions. First it was tariffs — instantly generating billions in revenue out of thin air. Then it was equity stakes in bailouts — flipping the script so taxpayers get stock instead of just writing blank checks. Now it’s university patents — turning a half-century racket into a taxpayer annuity.

It’s beyond historic. It’s getting harder and harder to adequately describe the breathtaking scope of what we’re witnessing in real time.

And let’s not forget that in early February, President Trump created a sovereign wealth fund. Yesterday, in related news, Lutnick announced it would be restyled as a “national and economic security fund.” We don’t know what the plan is yet, but the pieces are being assembled on the board. In even more intriguing comments, Lutnick also declared that defense giant Lockheed Martin was "basically an arm of the U.S. government," pointing out that it makes nearly all of its revenue from lucrative government weapons contracts.

Changes may be coming for the military-industrial complex, too.

More, please!

🔥 And there was much more. But our final update for today’s post came from Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, who calmly informed the President that tariff revenue was skyrocketing, now projected at $500 billion in its first year, and could reach as high as a trillion dollars.

CLIP: Scott Bessent declares 26% budget deficit improvement over Biden (1:26).

“I think we’re gonna see a bigger jump from August to September,” Bessent reported. “So I think we could be on our way well over half a trillion, maybe towards a trillion-dollar number.”

Only last Friday, the loopy Congressional Budget Office projected $400 billion in projected tariff revenues. In mere days, we’ve blown far beyond that stingy estimate.

Let’s do a couple more quick ones.

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Well, call me Uncle Herschel and spank my biscuits. It was the Logo That Ate $100 Million. Less than a week after unveiling a “modernized” logo that rudely deleted the overalled man leaning against a barrel, Cracker Barrel got stuffed in its own rocking chair. Customers revolted, conservative commentators mocked it, Wall Street shaved off nearly $100 million in market cap, and even the President weighed in. CBS ran the story headlined, “Cracker Barrel to return to its old logo after backlash.”

In short, they are trying to put the Cracker back in the Barrel.

Mere hours before the breakfast giant surrendered to inevitability, President Trump offered the Board of Directors some free advice:

They took the U.S. President’s advice. (TAW.) Exactly eight hours later, Cracker Barrel bravely retreated from the worst idea that any AWFL middle-aged female CEO ever dreamed up after a three-day DEI/ayahuasca retreat.

I wasn’t even kidding that they took President Trump’s advice. Behold yesterday’s tweet from White House Deputy Chief of Staff Taylor Budowich:

Yesterday afternoon, Cracker Barrel stock (CBRL) shot up +10%. Even though he was otherwise occupied with chewing the furniture at his “marathon” Cabinet Meeting and saying too little about Taylor Swift, President Trump single-handedly saved Cracker Barrel.

Top that, New York Times.

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Finally, in C&C’s “arrests and accountability” file, we got an update yesterday on the judge who tried to help a wife-beating illegal immigrant escape ICE custody by leading him out through the back courtroom door and diverting agents to the Chief Judge’s office. The AP reported the story below the headline, “Wisconsin judge accused of helping man evade ICE arrest loses a bid to drop charges.” Whoopsies. Now Judge Dugan can have her day in court.

Court wasn’t her first choice. Troll-like Judge Hannah Dugan raised three arguments in her motion to dismiss. First, she claimed the federal government violated Wisconsin’s state sovereignty and its own court system. Second, she argued that her arrest violated constitutional separation of powers (i.e., judges should never be arrested). Third, she argued that judges enjoy prosecutorial immunity when they are “just doing their job.”

The federal judge rejected all of Dugan’s arguments, and ordered lawyers to attend an upcoming status conference. That probably means he is preparing to schedule a trial date. Dugan’s disappointed lawyers are, presumably, mulling an appeal to the Seventh Circuit. But they didn’t mention an appeal, instead telling AP reporters, “we look forward to the trial, which will show Judge Dugan did nothing wrong and simply treated this case like any other in front of her courtroom.”

“Looking forward” to trial might be a wee overstatement. Maybe they do prefer their chances before a Wisconsin jury rather than the federal court of appeals. But at this point, with her chances of an easy dismissal having vanished like an illegal alien dodging ICE agents, Judge Dugan would be well-advised to take a plea.

As they kept telling us, no one is above the law.

Have a wonderful Wednesday! Race back here tomorrow morning, for even more delicious and nutritious essential news and commentary.

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