The revelation making the rounds again about Obama, how he sneaked through $221 million to his Palestinian terrorist friends during the last hours of his presidency, makes it elaborately clear that he was always in it for himself and for his pals.

For eight years Israel was betrayed and America was duped by a charmer.

There are movies about such men -- Tony Curtis in “The Great Impostor,” or Matt Damon in “The Talented Mr. Ripley” -- about men skilled in the art of deception. Through guile, a ready smile, a quick tongue, they charm their way up the ladder from one bamboozled household to the next.

Their papers are never in order, but they manage. They manage to reach the top. Both Curtis (whose film was based on a true story) and Damon did not know a thing about medicine or airplanes but they managed to run hospitals and to fake it as pilots. They got caught. But before that they had everybody fooled.

Sound familiar? Surely not to Progressives who wanted to be fooled or didn’t really care. So long as Obama was their choice he could do no wrong.

But to the rest of America, and the world, the damage bitterly lives on.

On three separate occasions since 2013, the US Federal Reserve sent shock waves through the global financial system when it tried to tighten monetary policy, and each time it was forced into partial retreat to halt the mayhem.

Over recent months the Federal Open Market Committee has been careful to take the global pulse before acting. It now hopes the coast is clear. Yesterday's (3/15) quarter point rise in the federal funds rate to 1% has been so loudly signaled in advance that investors have already adjusted.

Emerging markets seem better prepared, so far able to shrug it off. China has restored confidence in its exchange rate regime. Capital flight appears to be under control. Europe's shift towards bond tapering reduces the risk of a rocketing dollar. "We're not overly worried about downside shocks," said Janet Yellen, the Fed chairman.

Yet nobody really knows whether the world can handle a total of six rate rises over the course of 2017 and 2018 as sketched in the Fed's 'dot plots' scenario.

The recent (3/03) attack on a BBC television crew in Hunan province, China, reveals once again the Communist Party of China’s brazen thuggery and out-of-control bullying.

To physically attack a major foreign media crew, smashing their equipment, and then to force them to sign a confession is the most public example of what has been apparent for several years: Xi Jinping’s regime behaves more like gangsters than government.

Yet just as the assault on the BBC helps highlight China’s aggressively repressive behavior toward anyone, Chinese or foreigner, deemed to dissent or threaten the regime’s interests, it is only the tip of the iceberg.

If government-backed thugs can behave that way toward the international media, imagine how much worse it is for Chinese people?

Since he became president, Xi has presided over a dramatic deterioration in human rights over the past four years:

Was former secretary of labor and assistant attorney general Tom Perez’s victory over Cong. Keith Ellison in the race to serve as the new chairman of the Democrat National Committee a victory of centrist Democrats over radical anti-Semitic leftists in the party?

That is how the mainstream media is portraying Perez’s victory.  But how is that possible when Perez appointed the former Nation of Islam spokesman to serve as deputy DNC chairman as soon as his own victory was announced?

Perez is ready to cooperate with Ellison because the two men have the same ideological worldview and the same vision for the Democrat Party. As Mother Jones explained, “There’s truly not much ideological distance between the two.”

Far from being a victory for the centrist forces in the party, Perez’s win marks the solidification of the Far Left’s control over the party of Harry Truman.

The OPEC oil cartel – and Putin’s Russia – are waking up to an unpleasant surprise. Shale output from the Permian Basin in Texas is expanding faster than the world thought humanly possible.

The scale threatens to neutralize output cuts agreed by Saudi Arabia and a Russian-led bloc last November, and ultimately threatens break their strategic lockhold on the global crude market for a generation.

"People just don't seem to realize how big the Permian is. It will eventually pass the Ghawar field in Saudi Arabia, and that is the biggest in the world," said Scott Sheffield, founder of Pioneer Natural Resources and acclaimed 'King of the Permian'.

Fresh science broadly confirms the once-outlandish claims of Mr. Sheffield and the veteran wildcatters. Consultants IHS have tripled their estimate of ultimate recoverable resources in the Permian to 104bn barrels – recoverable now due to astonishingly rapid advances in American fracking technology.

Scientists at the Roslin Institute, near Edinburgh, said last week that they had edited the genomes of pigs, rendering them immune to a dangerous virus. The announcement is extraordinary precisely because it sounds almost routine these days.

Gene editing is already starting to save the lives of human cancer patients and generate healthier crops. Yet the battle to ensure it gains favor with public opinion must be urgently addressed. The usual suspects are already trying to blacken its name.

With the new gene-editing tool Crispr-Cas9, the Roslin scientists sliced out a short section from this gene in the fertilized egg of a pig. They then grew pigs from these eggs that turned out healthy and entirely normal in every way, including the functioning of the gene, but which denied the virus entry to the cell.

Cue an outbreak of horror about the risks of (cliché alert) designer babies. One newspaper has been blathering about “Frankenstein pigs.”  But a similar technique is already being used to treat leukemia in children: are they Frankenstein kids?

What will be the public reaction to the release of gene-edited animals or plants? Bring it on and cure us, or how dare you try to poison us? We have been here before, twice.

HA HA HA. Let’s be honest, the greatest Oscars fiasco in history couldn’t have happened to a bunch of smugger, more deserving people.

All night on Sunday (02/26), the theme of the Academy Awards had been one of truth and facts.  Forgive me if I laugh again?

For truth and facts have never been Hollywood’s strong point. Time and again, movies abuse and bastardize historical events to suit its slathering need to drive box office cash.  I don’t object to that practice, because frankly, I just want to be entertained when I go to the movies.

But I do object when Hollywood pretends to stand for “The Truth.”  Just as I object when the New York Times pretends to be an impartial newspaper.  It’s not.

The Times is the media version of the Academy and its membership: an elite, preening organization stuffed full of liberals that absolutely loathe all things Republican, and especially loathe Donald Trump.