YOU’RE FIRED? Trump Considering Ousting Lt. Col. Vindman From National Security Council.

WELL: Laura Ingraham Threatens to Run Against Mitt Romney After Impeachment Vote. “If I have to move there to run against him in four-and-a-half years, I will.”

WHEN KELLY MAHER GOES ALL IN, SHE REALLY GOES ALL IN: Real Best Life: A Homegrown Year. “I’m going to live off of that which I can produce on our small ‘micro-farm’ north of Denver, Colorado – for an entire year. It seems like such a bizarre thing to type it out loud, but here we are.”

ANALYSIS: TRUE. Vegans Just Need to Learn to Live With Bacon.

CHANGE? Scandal-Plagued SPLC Turns to Amnesty International for a New President.

WHERE’S JOE? His campaign on the line, Joe Biden goes missing in New Hampshire.

Outside the castle-themed Radisson Hotel where Joe Biden has been staying, his campaign bus was parked and ready for events.

But on Thursday, just five days before the crucial primary here, the candidate was nowhere to be found.

Biden spent Thursday gathered with his top advisers at his home in Wilmington, Del., seeking a reset and perhaps a last-ditch effort to save his candidacy, beginning with a debate Friday night. He held no public events.

Following dismal results in the Iowa caucuses that have rattled many in his orbit, his campaign is now simultaneously trying to lower expectations here — with some suggesting they would consider a finish as low as third place a victory — while also bracing for a second straight difficult Election Day.

His campaign isn’t dead; it’s just resting.

JONATHAN TURLEY: Nancy Pelosi should resign.

What followed was an utter disgrace. First, Pelosi dropped the traditional greeting before the start of the address, “Members of Congress, I have the high privilege and distinct honor of presenting to you the president of the United States.” Instead, she simply announced, “Members of Congress, the president of the United States.” It was extremely petty and profoundly inappropriate. Putting aside the fact that this is not her tradition, but that of the House, it is no excuse to note that the president was impeached.

Such an indignity was not imposed on President Clinton during his own impeachment proceeding, and anyone respecting due process would note that Trump has been accused, not convicted, at this point in the constitutional process. Pelosi proceeded to repeatedly shake her head, mouth words to others, and visibly disagree with the address. It was like some distempered distracting performance art behind the president.
…
Pelosi, like her predecessors, is supposed to remain stone faced during the address even if the president leaves her personally enraged. Indeed, House speakers have been the authority who kept other members in silent deference and respect, if not to the president, then to the office. However, Pelosi appeared to goad the mob, like a high schooler making mad little faces behind the school principal at an assembly. It worked as members protested and interrupted Trump. Pelosi became another Democratic leader, little more than a twitching embodiment of this age of rage.

What a nasty woman, if you’ll allow me to borrow a famous phrase.

BUT CNN HAD ASSURED ME THAT AMERICANS OVERWHELMINGLY WANTED HIM REMOVED: Forty-three percent of Americans back Trump acquittal, 41 percent opposed.

FEEL THE BERN? Buttigieg Wins? Confusion Persists Despite Iowa Caucus Results Reaching 100 Percent.

HMM: Pelosi’s Biggest SOTU Mistake Wasn’t Tearing Up the Speech.

BOEING: Starliner faced ‘catastrophic’ failure before software bug found. “If it had gone uncorrected it would have led to erroneous thruster firing.”

“While this anomaly was corrected in flight, if it had gone uncorrected it would have led to erroneous thruster firing and uncontrolled motion during SM separation for deorbit, with the potential for catastrophic spacecraft failure,” Hill said during the meeting.

Starliner’s December test flight had to be cut short due to a well-publicized timing error that delayed the spacecraft’s service module from performing an orbital insertion burn. This caused the thrusters on board the service module, which provides power to Starliner during most of its mission, to fire longer than expected. As a result, the spacecraft did not have enough fuel to complete a rendezvous with the International Space Station, a key component of the test flight in advance of crewed missions.

At Thursday’s meeting, Hill revealed the second issue related to software and thruster performance publicly for the first time.

However, as part of reporting on a story about Starliner software and thruster issues three weeks ago, a source told Ars about this particular problem. According to the source, Boeing patched a software code error just two hours before the vehicle reentered Earth’s atmosphere. Had the error not been caught, the source said, proper thrusters would not open during the reentry process, and the vehicle would have been lost.

What a mess.

PRIVACY: This tool reveals which of your favorite apps are sharing way too much data. “Seudo found that the McDonald’s app was collecting all sorts of data about the characteristics of my phone, and the King James Bible app kept pinging Facebook.”

KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEF: It’s Starting to Feel Like AOC Is a Republican Plant. “One of the more bizarre aspects of AOC’s ongoing struggle with verbal diarrhea is that the media insists on celebrating everything she says actually having intellectual heft. Sure, it’s not unusual for the mainstream media to fawn over their own creations — Beto O’Rourke comes to mind — but the treatment of AOC stands out because she is truly a remarkably stupid woman.”

WOW: Chernobyl shocker as fungi that eats radiation found inside nuclear reactor.

COLORADO: Party power brokers may regret anointing John Hickenlooper.

Hickenlooper famously declared during his vanity run for president that he was not cut out to be a senator because senators really don’t do anything. Disparaging an office where so many prominent and respected Coloradans of both parties have previously served–such as Gary Hart, Bill Armstrong, Tim Wirth, Hank Brown, Ben Campbell, Wayne Allard, Mark Udall and Ken Salazar–is insulting to their service and their records of accomplishment for Colorado and the nation.

Meanwhile, Hickenlooper has been mired in an ethics investigation that the national Democratic Party did not anticipate. Being investigated for violating Colorado’s ethics laws is one thing, but the way Hickenlooper is handling the controversy must be terribly embarrassing to Schumer and the DSCC.

The charges against Hickenlooper are substantive. He blew off ethics disclosure requirements and failed to accurately report travel expenses paid for by what he calls “friends” but that are really “special interest parties” while he was governor. In one case, he issued an executive order that directly benefited a wealthy supporter after being treated to a private flight to the wedding of the brother of that wealthy donor. Adding some special color to this episode is that Hickenlooper officiated at the wedding.

After these ethical lapses were exposed, the governor is entitled to state legal representation to answer the charges. But rather than using an assistant state attorney general costing the state $112 per hour, he insisted on the state paying one of Colorado’s most prominent and partisan private election law attorneys at $525 an hour.

The money to pay Hickenlooper’s legal expenses comes from a special fund of $146 million set up in 2003 by the federal government to help states in the aftermath of the 9/11 tragedy and the 2001 recession to cover essential government services or to cover the costs of certain unfunded federal mandates. Hickenlooper’s legal fees are “essential government services”?

It’s good to be the nomenklatura.

DECOUPLING: China grows isolated as airlines cancel more than 50,000 flights amid coronavirus epidemic.

FLASHBACK: The Case for Rick Perry. “Despite cheer-leading from the likes of Kathryn Jean Lopez and Jennifer Rubin, Mitt Romney has always struck me as a phony without any real core convictions except that he should be in charge; sort of the Republican answer to Bill Clinton, without the charm or adultery. Pick an issue and Romney’s been on both sides of it at one time or another. He seems the most likely of all the major candidates to be praised by The New York Times and The Washington Post for ‘growing’ in office.”

Well, that last bit certainly turned out to be prophetic — and Romney didn’t even have to get elected president first. Although it helped that he sold out the current occupant of the Oval Office.

NICE: Senator Tim Scott Just Gave America a Much-Needed Ward Cleaver Lecture About Fairness.

YES: A Jury of His Enemies: 2020 Dems Try to Subvert American Voters.

WELL, GOOD: NATO Eyes Troop Reductions in Afghanistan as U.S. Draws Down. “The Trump administration’s decision to eventually withdraw several thousand troops from America’s longest war has triggered a debate within the 29-country alliance.”

JEFF DUNETZ: Some Snarky Thoughts And Questions About The End Of The Impeachment Farce.

Between this and Iowa, it’s going to be a long time before we run out of snark.

COLORADO: Denver Businesses Called Proposed Climate Tax “Irresponsible,” “Not The Answer” To Environmental Concerns.

Several restaurant owners argued that restaurants will suffer especially under the new electricity and natural gas usage tax, as they are heavy users of natural gas for cooking, and traditionally, food outlets are operated on a very slim profit margin.

One of the most identifiable names included in the emails was from former-State Sen. and Denver City Councilwoman Paula Sandoval, a restaurant owner and member of a politically well-connected Democratic family that includes current Denver City Councilwoman Amanda Sandoval.

“I requested an analysis from XCEL energy of what it would cost my business and annually it will be approximately $3,000 or $250/month,” Sandoval wrote on August 21 in an email to Councilwoman-At-Large Debbie Ortega.

“As a restauranteur in your district, I think it is irresponsible for Denver City Council to push a ballot initiative that will increase the taxes on my business without a proper stakeholder process. I urge you to have a stakeholder process where constituents can communicate concerns with the proposal to council members before you stick us with a yearly bill of over $43,000,000,” she continued.

As previously reported by Western Wire, that includes the admission by Denver City Council President Jolon Clark’s staff that businesses were intentionally left out of the process due to time constraints in the development of the proposal.

They were left out because better-connected interests — woke environmentalists — wanted them left out.

Centrist Democrat entrepreneur John Hickenlooper did more than any other single person to bring downtown Denver back to life. But far-left Democrat governor John Hickenlooper set the stage for the wokest elements of his party to kill it again.

MIC DROP: Trump Blasts ‘Dishonest and Corrupt’ Democrats, Romney at National Prayer Breakfast.

FINALLY: Physicists determine the optimal soap recipe for blowing gigantic bubbles.

DECOUPLING: Coronavirus tests U.S. medical system’s unhealthy reliance on China for drugs, supplies. “The basic building blocks of U.S. health care are now under the control of the Chinese Community Party.”

Update: “Community” typo from the original NBC News story.