monitoring Trump and relevant contemporary events

"I would be careful before crediting the veracity of somebody under indictment"

Yes, and Trump is under impeachment, you ******* imbecile.

is willing to break any laws that get in is way. He has done so.

Sound the trumpets: 20th Century Fox, a name and klieg-lit logo that stretches back 85 years in Hollywood, is dropping the word Fox, a move that may prevent consumers from mistakenly thinking the movie studio has anything to do with Rupert Murdoch’s polarizing Fox News media empire.

Well, there are many British tourists in continental Europe - and driving there. (We still have around 20,000 British military personals and their families where I live.)

The problem is that Fox is broadly recognized as a propaganda operation which has probably done more damage to American political discourse and civility than any other single entity in our lifetimes.

This, of course, has been Trump's propaganda line from the beginning as a means of invalidating any criticism of his actions, words and his administration. But obviously it is an "argument" or charge that can be wielded any time impeachment proceedings begin regardless of circumstances.

Not only that but Parnas was/is very chummy with Giuliani, good enough terms to have a very friendly picture with Trump.

this reporter is showing typical cowardice in describing the rationale as a concern that Fox is "polarizing". That ain't the problem. The problem is that Fox is broadly recognized as a propaganda operation which has probably done more damage to American political discourse and civility than any other single entity in our lifetimes.

You may have noticed that trump cares about nothing but power himself, and is willing to break any laws that get in is way. He has done so.

that's why he's being impeached and why,

if there were any gop senators that had an ounce of independent thought between them, he would be convicted and removed from office.

the country does not like crooks in office.

But this would be to ignore all the private dinners and meetings Parnas had with Trump Jr, Giuliani and others close to Trump and all the communications between these people.

Your self-serving and deceptive statement that such charges can be made even in the absence of merit is merely a tautology, and without logical merit regarding the issue. ( Was this an example of your professed "logical rigor"?)

I believe the argument gets a bit stronger when one recognizes the impeachment efforts began soon after Trump took office and have continued with so far unproductive and highly one-sided investigations since then

Even more indicative is the evident fact that the Impeachment was voted in the House exclusively by Democrat Legislators - a totally partisan thing, and a stark contrast to previous impeachment proceedings.

You can prove me wrong if you present some actual instances, quotations, whatever to bolster your claim that impeachment efforts were underway at that point in time.

I believe the argument gets a bit stronger when one recognizes the impeachment efforts began soon after Trump took office...

During Barack Obama's tenure as President of the United States from 2009 to 2017, certain Republican members of Congress, as well as Democratic congressman Dennis Kucinich,stated that Obama had engaged in impeachable activity and that he might face attempts to remove him from office. Rationales offered for possible impeachment included false claims that Obama was born outside the United States, that he allegedly allowed people to use bathrooms based on their gender identity, an alleged White House cover-up after the 2012 Benghazi attack, and failure to enforce immigration laws. No list of articles of impeachment was ever drawn up and proposed to the Judiciary Committee.

Multiple surveys of U.S. public opinion found that the clear majority of Americans rejected the idea of impeaching Obama, while a majority of Republicans were in favor; for example, CNN found in July 2014 that 57% of Republicans supported these efforts while about two thirds of adult Americans in general disagreed with them.

This is untrue. Was there talk about the possibility of removing him from office? Yes. CBC/Radio Canada even had an "impeach-o-meter" assessing the likelihood of this happening. But this wasn't because of the close election. It was because people deemed him coarse, divisive, and generally unsuitable for the office.

Any hopes that the office itself might lift and transform him were dashed when he started lying about the size of the crowds at his inauguration.

So yes, it wasn't long after he took office that there was impeachment speculation but no "impeachment efforts" took place until his hamfisted attempt to shakedown President Zelensky became known.

Multiple surveys of U.S. public opinion found that the clear majority of Americans rejected the idea of impeaching Obama, while a majority of Republicans were in favor; for example, CNN found in July 2014 that 57% of Republicans supported these efforts while about two thirds of adult Americans in general disagreed with them.

Democrats have rounded on revelations about a private dinner of House Republicans on inauguration day in 2009 in which they plotted a campaign of obstruction against newly installed president Barack Obama.

During a lengthy discussion, the senior GOP members worked out a plan to repeatedly block Obama over the coming four years to try to ensure he would not be re-elected.

The disclosures – described as "appalling and sad" by Obama's chief strategist David Axelrod – undermine Republican claims that the president alone is to blame for the partisan deadlock in Washington.

A detailed account of who was present at the dinner on that January 20 night and the plan they worked out to bring down Obama is provided by Robert Draper in 'Do Not Ask What Good We Do: Inside the US House of Representatives', published this week.

In his book, Draper opens with the heady atmosphere in Washington on the days running up to the inauguration and the day itself, which attracted 1.8 million to the mall to witness Obama being sworn in as America's first black president.

Those numbers contributed to a growing sense of unease among Republicans as much the defeat in the White House race the previous November. The 15 Republicans were in a sombre mood as they gathered at the Caucus Room in Washington, an upscale restaurant where a New York strip steak costs $51.

Attending the dinner were House members Eric Cantor, Jeb Hensarling, Pete Hoekstra, Dan Lungren, Kevin McCarthy, Paul Ryan and Pete Sessions. From the Senate were Tom Coburn, Bob Corker, Jim DeMint, John Ensign and Jon Kyl. Others present were former House Speaker and future – and failed – presidential candidate Newt Gingrich and the Republican strategist Frank Luntz, who organised the dinner and sent out the invitations.

The dinner table was set in a square at Luntz's request so everyone could see one another and talk freely. The session lasted four hours and by the end the sombre mood had lifted: they had conceived a plan. They would take back the House in November 2010, which they did, and use it as a spear to mortally wound Obama in 2011 and take back the Senate and White House in 2012, Draper writes.

"If you act like you're the minority, you're going to stay in the minority," said Keven McCarthy, quoted by Draper. "We've gotta challenge them on every single bill and challenge them on every single campaign."

The Republicans have done that, bringing Washington to a near standstill several times during Obama's first term over debt and other issues.

On the more immediate future, they discussed targets such as Charlie Rangel, chairman of the House ways and means committee, who Gingrich said was vulnerable over his personal taxes. They would also target Treasury secretary Tim Geithner, demonstrate united and unyielding opposition to the president's economic policies, and release negative ads against vulnerable Democratic members of Congress.

Draper quotes Gingrich at the end of the meal: "You will remember this day. You'll remember this as the day the seeds of 2012 were sown."