News Lite: It’s Christmas Eve and we’re going take it easy today. President Trump is up and tweeting admiring things about himself that we are not going to repeat for him. He admires himself.

Boeing, Boeing, Gone: The Boeing aircraft company fired its CEO yesterday in the wake of two fatal crashes of the 737 Max and scandal about how the plane was made and put into service. Everyone was mad at Dennis Muilenbur, from regulators to legislators and families of the dead.

  Probably most importantly, Muilenbur annoyed the FAA by pressuring the agency to allow the grounded 737 Max back into service around the world. But the company needs to fix the plane’s automated system known as MCAS that was instrumental in both crashes. Instead, Boeing had to announced that it is temporarily shutting down production of the Max because no one is allowed to put the new planes in the air.

  Piled on top of the Max disaster was the failure last week of Boeing’s developmental space capsule to reach the International Space Station.

  Boeing said in a statement that its board of directors “decided that a change in leadership was necessary to restore confidence in the company moving forward as it works to repair relationships with regulators, customers, and all other stakeholders.”

  That’s corporate blah, blah for “we’re in a major crisis.”

The Standoff: The impeachment impasse between the House and Senate could go on for weeks as the two bodies wrangle over trial rules and demands for new documents, The Washington Post reports.

  Speaker Nancy Pelosi tweeted, “President Trump blocked his own witnesses and documents from the House, and from the American people, on phony complaints about the House process. What is his excuse now?”

  The President tweeted in his defense, “Pelosi gives us the most unfair trial in the history of the U.S. Congress, and now she is crying for fairness in the Senate, and breaking all rules while doing so. She lost Congress once, she will do it again!”

Stir Fried: According to numbers gathered by the reviewing website Yelp, the overall percentage of Chinese restaurants among all restaurants in the top 20 metropolitan areas has been falling.

  Chinese food is not necessarily less popular, but many of the restaurants are family owned and the kids don’t want to take over. They’re going to college and moving on to professional life.

T’is the Season: Hundreds of Christmas tree farms all over the country have closed, according to The NY Times. It’s a tough business. You can’t just sit there all year and watch the trees grow.

  Now the tree farms are expected to become Christmas theme parks for the hordes that come for trees the day after Thanksgiving. The owner of one farm told the Times, “You’ve got to have Santa Claus. You’ve got to have hot chocolate, you’ve got to have a hayride.”

  Shouldn’t that be a sleigh ride? Merry Christmas everyone.

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