They’re Not Marching For Renee Good’s Life

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Vance headlines the ‘March for Life’ today, just 24 hours after defending the agent who ended hers.

The Scene: Thousands are gathering on the National Mall right now for the March for Life. It is the movement’s biggest annual headline, but as the crowds cheer the end of Roe, the actual numbers tell a different story.

The Data Brief: We just published a look at the “Post-Roe Paradox.” Despite strict bans in 13 states and new life sentences for doctors, the number of abortions in America has actually risen since the court victory. An invisible “pill pipeline” and shield laws have effectively nullified state borders, meaning the movement that won the legal war is currently losing the supply war. But the predicted horrors for women on the margins are coming true.

📑 Read the full Trail Mix Brief

The Podcast (11:00 AM ET): We are live with the “Pre-Game” for the March, watching the ultimate political pivot. Vice President JD Vance is taking the stage to preach “sanctity of life” just 24 hours after he stood in Minneapolis to defend Renee Good’s killer.

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53 thoughts on “They’re Not Marching For Renee Good’s Life”

  1. Attribution: Let Us Prey –NEW STEVE SACK CARTOON! by Steve Sack, The Minneapolis Star-Tribune, MN
    [Steve Sack has been the editorial cartoonist for the Minneapolis Star Tribune since 1981 and is syndicated by Cagle Cartoons, Inc.. He is the winner of the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Cartooning.]


  2. President Trump says his concept of a deal with Greenland has no end date, anyone with a billion dollars can help Trump rule the world as Chairman for Life of the Board of Peace, and Stephen Colbert is offering an alternative fake club membership for only $100M.

  3. Attribution: winter power outages by Dave Granlund, PoliticalCartoons.com
    [Dave Granlunds cartoons have appeared in the New York Times, Chicago Tribune, Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek.]

    BTW, soon to depict my neighborhood in the deepest darkest hinterlands of KY if all the weather predictions are right.

  4. PatD, hunker down!
    Is this the big one? As Fred Sanford would say, clutching his heart.
    Our local news trying to get us all worked up about ‘biggest snow anybody’s ever seenn’ by Sunday, followed by ‘we really don’t know, it might be a big dud’.

  5. Sending Field Marshall Vance to the stage (yesterday in MN & today at Pro-Life rally in DC) might be Team Trump’s bid to quell 25th Amendment buzz?

    Reminds us what we get if we go through with it.

  7. Depending on which forecast source you check, snow forecast is anywhere from a few inches to a couple of feet of snow and up to a quarter inch of ice accompanied by downed power lines and low temps below zero during the week following the snow event, all within a couple hours of Esst Bumfuck. We’re ready – got our French toast emergency supplies and premade soup and chili ready to go.

  8. https://www.rawstory.com/ice-2675008006/

    As many as 200 businesses in Minnesota are set to be closed Friday as thousands across the state kick of a statewide general strike in an effort to combat the surge of federal immigration officers swarming the North Star State.

    *Weve needed this nationally for a year.

    ***

    https://www.fox9.com/news/mn-lawmakers-throw-support-behind-jan-23-general-strike

    Minnesota lawmakers are supporting a planned general strike on January 23 to protest ICE and support immigrant communities.

    *I believe Faux News has misinformation listed, too, as it states the strike is at 2pm. That time was for the nationwide walkout last Tuesday.

    ***

    https://www.npr.org/2026/01/23/nx-s1-5685388/statewide-economic-blackout-planned-in-minnesota-to-protest-ice-enforcement

    Statewide economic blackout planned in Minnesota to protest ICE enforcement

  9. https://www.independent.co.uk/sport/football/trump-greenland-world-cup-2026-boycott-fifa-gianni-infantino-b2904264.html

    The idea of threatening a boycott has, according to reports, been raised in German political circles, and there has also been a petition in the Netherlands.

    “It would be remarkable if European leaders weren’t seriously discussing a boycott as an option,” McGeehan adds.

    *It’s not just Greenland. They see what tRUMP’s N&zis are doing to civilians.

    ***

    France and Germany Rule Out Boycott of 2026 FIFA World Cup Amid Greenland Tensions

    As the countdown to the 2026 FIFA World Cup intensifies, France and Germany have explicitly dismissed any plans to boycott the tournament despite escalating geopolitical tensions over U.S. President Donald Trump’s threats regarding Greenland.

    *Aaaand, they cave faster than US Dems in Congress.

    Fans should definitely cancel their trips to the US. FIFA is corrupt and uncaring; they should move US matches to Canada and Mexico.

  10. https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/erika-kirk-ripped-featuring-controversial-023017384.html

    Erika Kirk’s latest project has received backlash over the feature of Pastor Greg Laurie, who is currently embroiled in child abuse and trafficking allegations.

    The widow of the late right-wing influencer Charlie Kirk launched her “Make Heaven Crowded” tour on January 21, which features Laurie as a primary speaker.

    Laurie is the senior pastor of Harvest Christian Fellowship in Riverside, who has been named in a wave of lawsuits filed in U.S. federal court alleging child abuse and trafficking by former pastor Paul Havsgaard.

    The lawsuit alleged that church leaders, including Laurie, allowed Havsgaard to act without oversight and overlooked multiple warning signs of his alleged misconduct when he ran church-supported children’s homes in Romania from 1998 to 2008.

    It also alleged that the church didn’t cease to financially support the Romanian homes despite reports of abuse, and that Havsgaard was also allowed to return to the United States with some of the children to raise even more funds.

  12. It’s -17° in Minneapolis, but the “Economic Ice Out” is heating up.

    JD Vance says the raids are for protection; locals say it’s a trap involving fake food vouchers used as bait. We dig into the road blockades, the “Angel Kids” narrative, and a heated live fact-check battle in the chat.

    Watch the replay here:

  17. WEell, as anyone here could probably guess, I seldom agree with George Will. Here’s that rare exception. WaPo.

    With executive power rampant, the right book has arrived

    Decades ago, a Supreme Court justice explained how to think today about Trump’s power grabs.

    The nation has long needed, but never more than now, what it now has. The new biography of a Supreme Court justice, “Robert H. Jackson: A Life in Judgment,” by University of Virginia law professor G. Edward White, arrives amid disputes involving judicial review of governmental, and especially presidential, actions presented as urgent for national security. Concerning this, Jackson believed judicial deference should be high, but not unlimited.

    In 1940, before Jackson joined the court, it ruled, 8-1, that a Pennsylvania school district could make saluting the flag mandatory. Some Jehovah’s Witnesses objected to this as idolatry. The court’s opinion was written by Justice Felix Frankfurter. He thought coercing the Jehovah’s Witnesses was mistaken, but he generally favored judicial restraint, and considered the school district’s objective had a rational basis: “National unity is the basis of national security.”

    In 1943, Jackson’s second year as a justice, the court repudiated this, 6-3, in an identical case involving Jehovah’s Witnesses. Writing for the majority, Jackson said:

    It is doubtful “that the strength of government to maintain itself would be impressively vindicated by our confirming power of the state to expel a handful of children from school.” So, national security does not justify “officially disciplined uniformity.” And: “The very purpose of a Bill of Rights was to withdraw certain subjects from the vicissitudes of political controversy, to place them beyond the reach of majorities and officials,” as “legal principles to be applied by the courts.” And: “Authority here is to be controlled by public opinion, not public opinion by authority.”

    […]

    During World War II, the existence of large West Coast populations with “Japanese ancestry” prompted the government to require people like Fred Korematsu, a U.S. citizen, to leave the area and submit to relocation in concentration camps. The military report justifying this was, as White says, saturated with racist suppositions, such as: All persons of Japanese ancestry are “subversive” and belong to “an enemy race” whose “racial strands are undiluted.”

    In 1944, the court ruled 6-3 against Korematsu’s challenge. Dissenting, Jackson held that courts should not review military officials’ wartime decisions. The internment policy, although “very bad as constitutional law,” was, Jackson wrote, promulgated by a military commander implementing a military program, “not making law in the sense the courts know the term.”

    Jackson saw imprudence in the court evaluating the order’s constitutionality: “Once a judicial opinion rationalizes such an order to show that it conforms to the Constitution … the court for all time has validated the principle of racial discrimination in criminal procedure and of transplanting American citizens.” Then: “The principle … lies about like a loaded weapon ready for the hand of any authority that can bring forward a plausible claim of an urgent need.”

    In 1952, the court and Jackson again confronted the task of reconciling constitutional principles and a president’s claim of urgency. With the Korean War raging, Harry Truman said an impending nationwide steelworkers strike would “jeopardize national defense,” so he issued an executive order for government to seize and operate most mills. The companies sued, arguing that no act of Congress or constitutional provision validated Truman’s action.

    Truman’s lawyers argued that his authorization “could be implied from the aggregate of his powers under the Constitution,” especially as commander in chief. The court disagreed, 6-3.

    Concurring, Jackson said that Truman’s action flowed from neither an express nor implied authorization by Congress, and was against Congress’s will as expressed in a 1947 labor relations law that made no provision for such presidential action. It would be “sinister and alarming” to say that the president, enjoying vast discretion regarding foreign affairs, can by “his own” foreign commitment “vastly enlarge his mastery over” the nation’s internal affairs. This way, the president “of his own volition” can give himself “undefined emergency powers.” Truman’s seizure of the mills originates in his “individual will” and “represents an exercise of authority without law.”

    Today, the nation is inured to presidential claims of urgent needs — “emergencies,” “existential” dangers — being used for evasions of the Constitution. Said Jackson, our institutions for keeping the executive under the law might be “destined to pass away,” but “it is the duty of the Court to be last, not first, to give them up.”

    Yep. These unitary executive and expansive Article 2 powers as claimed by Dumbass are way over the edge.

  18. 9/11 permanently altered how the American psyche perceives emergencies and existential threats. Would our response have differed if we’d had less militaristic and industrial-complicit leadership in power at that time?

    Rhetorical question. Answer ambiguous.

  19. well if you’re nostalgic for war-crimes past, i watched “Official Secrets” on Netflix yesterday, about UK intelligence whistleblower Katherine Gun, who attempted to prevent UK involvement in Iraq by leaking information about her government’s participation in a Bushcon scheme to extort support for the war from skeptical nation-states

    star-studded cast if your stars are master British thespians 👍

    relevant to current events

    featuring an unflattering characterization of Tony Blair who apparently deserves it

  21. When asked about its post, the White House pointed to a message on X from Kaelan Dorr, the deputy communications director, who wrote, “Enforcement of the law will continue. The memes will continue.”

    White House Posts Altered Photo Showing Arrested Minnesota Protester Crying

    The New York Times ran the image through an A.I. detection system and concluded that it showed signs of manipulation.

    https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/22/us/politics/nekima-armstrong-photo-white-house.html

  24. Checking in.
    My laptop is in the shop, part comes in tomorrow. So does 12in of snow. Any bets on which really arrives?
    If someone can help for Sunday I would appreciate it. It looks like I’m not going to be doing Serendipity this week.

    Jack

  26. Is it a meme or is when the govt uses AI to make someone they’ve arrested look like they are crying, or alters their appearance in any significant way?

    Can she sue for libel.. or maybe claim they are poisoning the well when it comes to trail?

  27. Defamation, or whatever case was brought against Guiliani and his lies about Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss.

    My maggers totally believed the two Georgia poll workers had committed election fraud because “the pictures proved it.”

    I would take a bet they still believe it.

  32. A dated book now, but still valid, and made a lasting impression when I listened to a radio interview with the author.

    The Way We Never Were: American Families And The Nostalgia Trap by Stephanie Coontz

    Examines two centuries of American family life and shatters a series of myths and half-truths that burden modern families. Placing current family dilemmas in the context of far-reaching economic, political, and demographic changes, Coontz sheds new light on such contemporary concerns as parenting, privacy, love, the division of labor along gender lines, the black family, feminism, and sexual practice.

  33. Revised and updated. It never gets old.

    The definitive edition of the classic, myth-shattering history of the American family.

    Leave It to Beaver was not a documentary, a man’s home has never been his castle, the “male breadwinner marriage” is the least traditional family in history, and rape and sexual assault were far higher in the 1970s than they are today. In The Way We Never Were, acclaimed historian Stephanie Coontz examines two centuries of the American family, sweeping away misconceptions about the past that cloud current debates about domestic life. The 1950s do not present a workable model of how to conduct our personal lives today, Coontz argues, and neither does any other era from our cultural past. This revised edition includes a new introduction and epilogue, exploring how the clash between growing gender equality and rising economic inequality is reshaping family life, marriage, and male-female relationships in our modern era.

    More relevant than ever, The Way We Never Were is a potent corrective to dangerous nostalgia for an American tradition that never really existed.

  34. Over the course of 60 years, casual sex, abortion, childlessness by choice, and no-fault divorce became normalized, while marriage and the natural family became stigmatized.

    the fruition of 20 years of enabling each others’ deluded views in dark online corners

    not a unique phenomenon but the most consequential example of it

  37. Nobody can work for or with Dodo unless they corrupt or debase themselves. You have to work around him, if not against him, even secretly, if you are to survive with any dignity intact, and to preserve whatever can be salvaged of American core principles and values. As immoral and lethal as he is, we have to do whatever it takes for the country to survive, at least, for three more years. Sooner if nature takes its course.

  38. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/ap-report-ryan-wedding-elite-snowboarder-turned-most-wanted-drug-trafficking-fugitive-arrested-in-mexico

    Ryan Wedding, a former Canadian Olympic snowboarder who was among the FBI’s top fugitives and faces charges related to multinational drug trafficking and the killing of a federal witness, has been arrested in Mexico, top Justice Department officials said Friday.

    *tRUMP keeps pardoning drug dealers, but when I say something about that…

  41. Ivy – Even when IT happens, we’re still deep in his doo-doo. Just because the mob boss is gone doesn’t mean it’s fixed. Any in-fighting might be to our advantage, though. Did Adolf put Rubio on the ~BOP~ to keep him out of JD’s way?

  42. F.B.I. Agent Who Tried to Investigate ICE Officer in Shooting Resigns
    The resignation of the agent, Tracee Mergen, was only the latest shock wave to have emerged from the Justice Department’s handling of the shooting of Renee Good.

    By Alan Feuer and Glenn Thrush
    Jan. 23, 2026
    Updated 6:02 p.m. ET

    An F.B.I. agent who sought to investigate the federal immigration officer who fatally shot a 37-year-old woman in Minneapolis this month has resigned from the bureau, according to two people familiar with the matter.

    The agent, Tracee Mergen, left her job as a supervisor in the F.B.I.’s Minneapolis field office after bureau leadership in Washington pressured her to discontinue a civil rights inquiry into the immigration officer, Jonathan Ross, according to one of the people. Such inquiries are a common investigative step in similar shootings.

    Ms. Mergen’s resignation was only the latest shock wave to have emerged from the Justice Department’s handling of the shooting of Renee Good, an unarmed mother who was killed on Jan. 7 as she was behind the wheel of her Honda Pilot.

    After the incident, several Trump administration officials described Ms. Good as a “domestic terrorist,” accusing her of trying to ram Mr. Ross with her vehicle. But a video analysis by The New York Times showed no indication that he had been run over.

    More at link

  43. Trump is “mad” at the optics? Please. Cruelty was the point and ICE delivered. Now that it’s messy, he’ll take the back door exit: Declare victory, leave the wreckage, and go find another blue city to terrorize.

  44. blue, America will require our own “de-nazification” and a “Marshall Plan” to rebuild the country economically and return to a semblance of our original foundation.

  45. another blue city to terrorize

    Craig, It might be Joe’s State. “Hey, Google, is ICE moving into Delaware?”

    Yes, federal immigration enforcement actions by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) have been reported in Delaware as part of a broader national push for increased arrests and deportations, according to reports from early 2025 and ongoing updates.
    Key Details on ICE Activity in Delaware:
    Targeted Operations: A “fugitive apprehension operation” was conducted in Georgetown, Delaware, in early February 2025, which was confirmed by local police.
    Investigation Surge: Federal prosecutors have targeted over 15 Delaware businesses for suspected immigration violations in 2025.
    Activity Areas: Reports indicate ICE activity has been observed in areas such as Georgetown, Elsmere, Lewes, and Rehoboth, often involving agents working across state lines, such as in Maryland.
    Local Response: While some local departments previously considered agreements to assist ICE, Delaware has taken steps to limit, not expand, cooperation. In July 2025, Delaware signed legislation (HB 182) that banned local law enforcement agencies from entering into 287(g) agreements with ICE.
    Haitian Community Concerns: There have been reports of increased scrutiny on the Haitian community, with reports of police departments, such as in Laurel, previously compiling lists of immigrant residents.
    Legal Protection Measures:
    Ban on Local Cooperation: The state passed laws to prevent local police from being used as extensions of ICE.
    Know Your Rights: The Delaware Attorney General’s Office and the Delaware Hispanic Commission have issued guidelines for residents on their rights during interactions with immigration officials.
    As of late 2025 and early 2026, concerns remain in immigrant communities regarding increased federal actions despite state-level restrictions on local cooperation.

  46. Seeing videos of ICE N&zis ramming cars, pushing cars through through intersections, stupid and dangerous.

    I wonder what car insurance companies think about the broken windows and dented vehicles of ICE victims. We, the taxpayers, are paying for the ICE vehicles they are trashing.

    Oh, Katie mentioned they are pretending to have food pantries as a trap; they are also pretending to be press now. They will be using water canons against protesters at Whipple. Hope ICE N&zis get instant karma on the icy pavement theyll create.

  47. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/federal-judge-rejects-doj-motion-detain-arrested-minnesota-protesters-rcna255666

    Judges in Minnesota denied motions by the Trump administration to detain three protesters arrested this week for demonstrating inside a St. Paul church whose pastor allegedly works for Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

    U.S. District Judge Laura M. Provinzino wrote in her order for two of the protesters, Nekima Valdez Levy Armstrong and Chauntyll Louisa Allen, that Justice Department lawyers failed to “demonstrate that a detention hearing is warranted, or that detention is otherwise appropriate.”

    *It’s a small win, but it’s a win.

  51. Reports of a lot of ICE SUVs (that WE PAID FOR AGAINST OUR WILL) in KC, MO and Ohio.

    It will be interesting (and horrifying) to see if MAGAts who think these unconstitutional sweeps/kidnappings/trafficking/abuse/theft by ICE goons are OK in their backyard. Will armed a-holes in camo walking around make them feel freer?

  52. Yesterday’s protests were seen around the world. Even in -10, feels like -25 with wind chill, Minnesotans prevailed! So proud to be part of this community!

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