The Oklahoma state senator charged last week with felony child prostitution resigned Wednesday, though Ralph Shortey's exit will not change the balance in the Republican-dominated state Senate.

Ralph Shortey, R-Oklahoma City, was arrested last week and charged with hiring a 17-year-old boy for sex after meeting him on Craigslist.

Police charged the 35-year-old married father of four with engaging in child prostitution, engaging in prostitution within 1,000 feet of a church, and transporting a minor for prostitution — all felonies.

We'll keep this short.

Russia Insider always had a soft spot for Vermont Senator and "socialist" Bernie Sanders.

Yes, he supported the destruction of Yugoslavia; yes, he championed a wide range of dumb ideas.

But there was something magical about the way this frumpy Vermont grandpa exposed Hillary Clinton as a walking political joke.

The anti-Russia hysteria gripping the Democratic Party marks a "trading places" moment as the Democrats embrace the New Cold War and the New McCarthyism, flipping the script on Republicans.

Caught up in the frenzy to delegitimize Donald Trump by blaming his victory on Russian meddling, national Democrats are finishing the transformation of their party from one that was relatively supportive of peace to one pushing for war, including a confrontation with nuclear-armed Russia.

This "trading places" moment was obvious in watching the belligerent tone of Democrats on the House Intelligence Committee on Monday as they impugned the patriotism of any Trump adviser who may have communicated with anyone connected to Russia.

Ranking Democrat, Rep. Adam Schiff of California, acknowledged that there was no hard evidence of any Trump-Russia cabal, but he pressed ahead with what he called "circumstantial evidence of collusion," a kind of guilt-by-association conspiracy theory that made him look like a mild-mannered version of Joe McCarthy.

Democrats have introduced the creatively acronymized MAR-A-LAGO Act requiring the White House to publish the visitor log for Mar-a-Lago, President Donald Trump's resort where he has spent nearly a quarter of his time in office.

"Making Access Records Available to Lead American Government Openness Act," or the MAR-A-LAGO Act was introduced Thursday by Senators Tom Udall (D-New Mexico), Sheldon Whitehouse (D-Rhode Island), Jack Reed (D-Rhode Island) and Tom Carper (D-Delaware).

President Trump, the author of The Art of the Deal, has been projecting his usual bravado in public this week about the prospects of repealing the Affordable Care Act. Privately he is grappling with rare bouts of self-doubt.

Mr. Trump has told four people close to him that he regrets going along with Speaker Paul D. Ryan's plan to push a health care overhaul before unveiling a tax cut proposal more politically palatable to Republicans.

He said ruefully this week that he should have done tax reform first when it became clear that the quick-hit health care victory he had hoped for was not going to materialize on Thursday, the seventh anniversary of the act's passage, when the legislation was scheduled for a vote.

Two of his most influential advisers — Stephen K. Bannon, his chief strategist, and Gary D. Cohn, the National Economic Council director, who had a major role in pushing the bill — came to agree, and did not like the compromise that was emerging. So on Thursday night, Mr. Trump delivered an ultimatum.

He dispatched his budget adviser, Mick Mulvaney, to a conference of House Republicans and told them they had to vote on Friday. And if the bill fails, he said, Mr. Trump will move on.

Today we are witnessing one of the most important events in political history. But you probably can't see it because the news is talking about healthcare, and how Ryan and Trump totally failed to get enough votes.

The real story is happening in parallel with the healthcare story, and that's what renders it invisible. Something enormous is happening that has nothing to do withanything you are seeing in the news. In fact, you'll probably read it here for the first time.

I'm dragging this out to see if you can guess the big news before I tell you. It is something I predicted would happen. It is something the country needs MORE than healthcare. It was, until yesterday, perceived as the biggest problem in the United States, if not the entire world.

And that problem almost totally went away yesterday. The smell might linger, but the problem has ended. We should be celebrating, but instead we will be yammering about healthcare.

Do you know what problem just got solved? It's invisible for now, but later everyone will be able to see it.

Don't see it?

Okay, I'll just tell you.

With the failure of the Ryan healthcare bill, the illusion of Trump-is-Hitler has been fully replaced with Trump-is-incompetent meme. Look for the new meme to dominate the news, probably through the summer. By year end, you will see a second turn, from incompetent to "Competent, but we don't like it."

I have been predicting this story arc for some time now. So far, we're ahead of schedule.

In the 2D world, where everything is just the way it looks, and people are rational, Trump and Ryan failed to improve healthcare. But in the 3D world of persuasion, Trump just had one of the best days any president ever had: He got promoted from Hitler to incompetent. And that promotion effectively defused the Hitler-hallucination bomb that was engineered by the Clinton campaign.

In all seriousness, the Trump-is-Hitler illusion was the biggest problem in the country, and maybe the world. It was scaring people to the point of bad health. It made any kind of political conversation impossible. It turned neighbors and friends against each other in a way we have never before seen. It was inviting violence, political instability, and worse.

In my opinion, the Trump-is-Hitler hallucination was the biggest short-term problem facing the country. Congress just solved for it, albeit unintentionally. Watch the opposition news abandon the Trump-is-scary concept to get all over the "incompetent" theme.

No one wants an incompetent president, but calling the other side a bunch of bumblers is routine politics. We just went from an extraordinary risk (Trump=Hitler) to ordinary politics (The other side=incompetent). Ordinary politics won't spark a revolution or make you punch a coworker. This is a good day for all of us. It just doesn't look that way because the news is distracting you with the healthcare issue, which is also important, but a full level down in importance from electing Hitler (in your mind).

Speaking of healthcare, I predicted on Periscope here several days ago that the only way to get a bill passed was to let Ryan fail hard on the first attempt while scaring the left at the same time. That softens both sides to the middle. There was literally no other path to the middle. You couldn't get there without the first step being a major failure by the majority party. This necessary step toward success is, of course, being reported as total failure.

Today I'm getting a lot of what I call the "November 7th effect." That's where my critics are prematurely celebrating my wrongness because the Ryan version of healthcare failed. I hope to see my critics again toward the end of the year. Don't be strangers.

Update: Watch on Twitter as my critics come after me personally and ignore my points. That's how you know I'm onto something. (Otherwise they would criticize the point.)

President Donald Trump has reportedly asked the House GOP leadership to pull a bill eliminating major financial provisions of Obamacare ahead of a scheduled vote, despite a week of intense negotiations involving Trump himself.

"We just pulled it," Trump told the Washington Post's Robert Costa, adding that he doesn't blame House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wisconsin) for the bill's failure.

The vote on the American Health Care Act (AHCA) was originally scheduled for Thursday, the seventh anniversary of the signing of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, unofficially known as Obamacare. House GOP leadership postponed the vote until Friday after it became clear it would not happen until the middle of the night because they did not have enough votes.

"This is a disappointing day for us," Ryan told reporters Friday afternoon, describing the setback as "growing pains" that come from moving from opposition to governing.

Ryan thanked Trump, Vice President Mike Pence, OMB Director Mick Mulvaney and HHS Secretary Tom Price for their support for the bill, and said the House Republicans just could not get enough of a consensus to proceed.

Eleven young people have been detained at the notorious Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp in southern Poland after they slaughtered a sheep, took their clothes off and chained themselves up, all the while giving no indication as to their motive.

Young people, aged between 20 and 27, killed a sheep, took their clothes off and then handcuffed themselves in front of the camp's notorious sign saying "Arbeit macht frei" (Work makes you free"), the museum said in a statement, according to Krakow.Onet.

All of the participants have been detained. The group reportedly used a drone to record the action.

"The individuals will be transferred to a police station for questioning. A large group of police officers are at the scene," police spokeswoman Malgorzata Jurecka said, according to AFP.

China's reaching out to Israel and Saudi Arabia is not a case of selling out to Zionism and Wahhabism. It is the product of a pragmatic conception of statesmanship intended to lay the foundations for a multipolar world.

Far away from the public eye and amidst relatively little fanfare compared to other official visits of leaders elsewhere across the world, both the Saudi King and Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu were both just recently in China to clinch dozens of deals.

The mainstream media reported on these events, though they were conspicuously absent from most coverage by alt-media. There's a fair chance that it might just be coincidence, and that small teams of journalists with limited resources only chose to focus on the most pressing worldwide issues, of which there are many, or it could be due to something else, and that's the "political correctness" which has recently become a driving force in the online multipolar information community.

Beware, it can burn eyes, reality on the war in Syria, Aleppo. Hospitals totally destroyed and neutral White Helmets, heroes in Aleppo? An Oscar? A nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize? At what price will we continue to lie and kill, to justify this war, to support terrorist groups, to keep a country on the brink of suffocation like the others before? I quickly compile some images I took yesterday that will give you another perspective.