Netanyahu Vows To Close Al Jazeera ‘Immediately’ After Knesset Passes Controversial Law
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Monday announced he has renewed and intensified efforts to shut down Qatar-based Al Jazeera’s operations inside Israel, Gaza, and the West Bank.
He pledged to “act immediately to stop” Al Jazeera’s ability to function there, following Israel’s Knesset approving a law which grants top ministers sweeping powers to ban any foreign news networks deemed a threat to Israel’s security.
“Al Jazeera will no longer be broadcast from Israel,” Netanyahu said on X Monday. “I intend to act immediately in accordance with the new law to stop the channel’s activity.”
Israeli officials have long charged Al Jazeera with advancing an anti-Israel bias in its coverage. Simultaneously the Arab media network has stood accused of sympathizing with Hamas terrorists. Netanyahu’s fresh statement furtheraccused Al Jazeera of harming Israel’s security on Oct.7 and actively participating in the attack on civilians.
Israel’s parliament passed the new law giving authorities unprecedented powers to shut down foreign press offices in a 70-10 vote on Monday evening (local). There are reports indicating that the legislation is literally called the “Al Jazeera” law.
The White House has responded by calling the development “concerning”in a very carefully worded statement which stopped short of outright condemning the move.
“We believe in the freedom of the press. It is critical. It is critically important, and the United States supports the critically important work journalists around the world, and that includes those who are reporting in in the conflict in Gaza,” said spokeswoman Karine Jean-Pierre in a briefing. “So, we believe that work is important. The freedom of the press is important. And if those reports are true, it is concerning to us.”
Currently, Al Jazeera has offices located in the West Bank and Gaza, and has provided 24-hour news coverage in English and Arabic of the Gaza war, going back to Oct.7. The network’s website also carries frequent, round-the-clock updates of regional developments. Its camera crews have also been capturing Israeli air raids on the Gaza Strip in real time, sometimes with buildings coming down in the very moments live shots are rolling.
A fresh example of Al Jazeera’s live coverage from on the ground in Gaza…
Video captures the moment Israeli forces bomb a tent for displaced Palestinians and journalists at the Al-Aqsa Hospital compound in central Gaza ⤵️ pic.twitter.com/88RRWmDrkO
Almost two years ago, in May of 2022, a popular senior Al Jazeera journalist, Shireen Abu Akleh, was shot dead while reporting on the scene of an Israeli military raid in the West Bank town of Jenin. As a Palestinian Christian, she was given a church burial attended by thousands, but the procession with the coffin was later attacked by Israeli police, in an incident that garnered international media attention.
Abu Akleh also held American citizenship, and so her killing resulted in strong statements of condemnation from the White House. From there, tensions between Al Jazeera and the Israeli government have only gotten worse.
“I’m sorry for the harsh message, but somebody needs to tell the truth,” virologist Dr. Geert Vanden Bossche
Did you have a fabulous Transgender Visibility Day, uncluttered with any loose talk about one Jesus Christ and his travails in the Roman Levant some 2000 years ago?
The Easter Bunny desisted from twerking on the White House lawn this time around, but the Party of Chaos still nailed down the vote of the .000429 percent of the population that identifies as opposite the clerical error made upon their sexual assignment at birth.
All in all, this may be the last grotesque frivolity the political class indulges in for a long time to come, and I’ll you why.
I had the honor of interviewing the Belgian virologist Geert Vanden Bossche on Friday for my podcast, and he had quite a sobering message.
“What I am predicting,” he said, “is a massive, massive tsunami” of illness and death among highly-vaccinated populations with dysregulated immune systems.
“You commit errors or even crimes at the very small scale, you can hide them,” he said (at around 47:00 minutes into the hour-long discussion).
“I have seen this happen with the Ebola vaccination with Africa a number of years ago. . . . However, if you do this at the very large scale, like what has happened with this mass [Covid] vaccination campaign, the truth will surface. And those who have committed these crimes who have been lying to the people, who have not been taking care of the health and safety of the people, will be severely, severely punished. . . . If these people would now go out and say, ‘Yeah, wait a minute, we have been making some mistakes, it wasn’t all right, we have to correct them, we have to revise our opinion,’ these people will be stoned in the streets. . . . They can only hope that something will happen that will distract from this issue, but it won’t. . . . The truth will surface: this has been a large-scale experiment of gain-of-function on the very human population. This will be something that will be reported in history for many many generations to come.”
A bit further on (around 55:20 minutes) he says, “You will see what will happen, for example, in the next coming weeks. . . is more and more cases of more serious long Covid…”
“They will start to replace the surge of the cancers. . . now we have a more chronic phase. It will end with a hyper-acute phase, a huge, huge wave. . . I’ve been studying this now for four years. I know what I’m talking about.
I’m probably the only person, in all modesty, who understands the immunology behind this. . . .”
(At 1:00:12) “The thing I want your audience to understand, what we will be facing in the hyper-acute Covid crisis that is imminent, is that we will have to build a completely new world. . . .”
“It is very very clear that when this starts, our hospitals will collapse. And that means the chaos in all kinds of layers of society — financial, economic, social, you name it — will be complete. And that is what I’m very clearly predicting. . . .
It’s very strange for me to make such statements, but I’m not hiding it because I’m two hundred percent convinced that it will happen.”
Now that you’ve had an ice-cold shower, consider some further implications of this scenario.
One is that the government and its public health officials may try to attribute the blame for this to the “Disease X” story they’ve been peddling for about a year, the “next pandemic,” something entirely new.
That will not be true. They will be trying to cover their asses. Rather, this next episode will be the result of the epic blunders they already made, beginning in 2020, with the emergence of Covid-19. The variant that causes the coming hyper-acute crisis will be quite different from the original “Wuhan” strain, but it will be a direct descendent of it, having mutated in the bodies of the vaccinated. It was, after all, Dr. Vanden Bossche who declared at the outset of the Covid melodrama in 2021 that vaccinating into the teeth of an ongoing pandemic disease was absolutely the wrong strategy from an immunological point-of-view, and sure to produce a grievous outcome.
What, if anything, can you do to prepare for this? Dr. Vanden Bossche is also very clear:
“What I can advise. . . to all these vaccinated people: they need to avoid reinfection. It is the reinfection of vaccinated people that is responsible for this situation. . . . Well, the only thing they can do — it’s very simple — is take anti-virals, of course. The only difference is, you will not be able to wait to take anti-virals until you have symptoms. . . .
As soon as people see that in one of the other countries, or one of the other states in the United States, when this starts with hospitalizations going up very rapidly, they need to take anti-virals prophylactically, not wait until they have any symptoms. I’m in Belgium. If it starts in the US, or starts in Israel, or starts in the UK, I bet you that within a few days, you will see the same scenario in many of the highly-vaccinated countries.”
By “anti-virals,” Dr. Vanden Bossche means specifically Ivermectin, the Nobel Prize-winning drug that the FDA and the CDC demonized brutally in order to distract the public from knowing that there was a safe and effective treatment for Covid. To acknowledge that would have vacated Pfizer’s and Moderna’s Emergency Use Authorization, which allowed them to make tens of billions of dollars on a very poorly tested pharma product while enjoying blanket protection against lawsuits.
“I have been predicting already a half a year ago, that the public health authorities are finally going to have mandates for ivermectin.” Dr. Vanden Bossche said.
“The results with ivermectin are fabulous. It is very safe. It is the only anti-viral that is cost-effective, that is widely available, that can be supplemented in sufficient quantities. . . . There is simply no alternative.”
Note that just last week, as a result of a lawsuit brought in the Texas Southern District federal court, the FDA agreed to finally take down the social media messages it had put up to lawlessly block the use of ivermectin. Remember the mocking tweet: “You’re not a horse, you’re not a cow, come on y’all.” The truth was that the FDA had no authority to tell doctors how to practice medicine; nor to block FDA-approved drugs (including ivermectin), even for off-label treatments. Off-label treatment with approved drugs is routine in medicine. Instead of ivermectin, US public health officials pushed the use of unsafe remdesivir with intubation, resulting in many thousands of avoidable deaths. This is only one of the crimes they will have to answer for.
If Dr. Vanden Bossche’s scenario comes to pass, the “hyper-acute Covid crisis” will intersect with the elections of 2024, and not just in the USA.
You would naturally expect some extreme despotic hysterics out of the “Joe Biden” government.
They will surely try to run their “Disease X” ruse. But they have already lost the trust of the people they made war against in their own country. In which case, expect resistance among the un-sick. No more trips will be laid on us.
Gold Hits New Record Highs, Bonds Battered As Inflation Fears Reignite
The macro picture was not great for the doves today…
On a day dominated by the illiquidity of absent European markets still celebrating Easter, the Manufacturing survey headline data was mixed (ISM turned positve) but the prices components were very much not mixed – both signaling soaring costs and prices being passed on to consumers at the fastest pace in 18 months. As an aside, The Cleveland Fed’s CPI NOWCAST is starting to accelerate meaningfully once again…
Source: Bloomberg
The one redeeming ‘bad news’ datapoint was an unexpected plunge in construction-spending (its second monthly decline in a row and the biggest MoM drop since Oct 2022) but the market was focused on the inflationary aspect of PMIs, sending June rate-cut odds back below 50%…
Source: Bloomberg
Bonds were battered today – again amid an illiquid market – with yields up 10-12bps
Source: Bloomberg
…that was among the worst (upward) yield moves for the long-end in the last 18 months…
Source: Bloomberg
…Pushing yields back up to the highs of the year…
Source: Bloomberg
And the higher yields actually hurt stocks (admittedly only a bit) for a change…
Source: Bloomberg
…with Small Caps and The Dow the worst performers. Futures all opened with decent upside on Sunday night (closed since Thursday pre-PCE), but only Nasdaq managed to cling to very modestly green on the day. A little late-day meltup put a little lipstiick on another wise pig of a day for most stocks…
Before we leave equity-land, we note that DJT took a tumble today, erasing its post-SPAC gains…
The dollar broke out of its recent range back near the highs of the year…
Source: Bloomberg
And while the dollar was stronger, gold managed to hold gains on the day, spiking to a new record high at $2265…
Source: Bloomberg
Israeli strikes in Iran and more drone strikes prompted oil prices to jump to new cycle highs (WTI $84.50) as geopolitical risk premia rise (highest since Oct 2023)…
Source: Bloomberg
Bitcoin had another wild ride, surging up near record highs overnight, sliding intraday as Asia closed and as US equity markets opened, then bouncing back off $68,000…
Source: Bloomberg
Perpetual futures were once again the driver of the downswsings (as we likely see the continued trend of dump in futs and pump in ETFs)…
Finally, it’s worth noting US Tax day is April 15th. As Goldman’s John Flood noted earlier, seasonality will likely come into play here as the retail community tends to sell stocks into 4/15 to raise cash for these payments…
The prestigious Harvard University has seen a noticeable decrease in the number of applications to the school, after many months of controversy over the university’s handling of anti-Semitism on campus, as well as other controversies involving plagiarism and forced diversity.
According to Just The News, Harvard saw a 5% decrease in the number of applications between last year and this year.
While the class of 2027 saw about 57,000 applications for Harvard, the incoming class of 2028 saw about 54,000.
The controversy started in the immediate aftermath of the October 7th attacks against Israel by the Islamic terrorist group Hamas, which resulted in the deaths of over 1,400 Israelis. On the Harvard campus shortly thereafter, multiple demonstrations broke out in support of Hamas, which frequently featured anti-Semitic slurs and harassment of Jewish students.
After Congress launched an investigation into the university’s poor handling of anti-Semitism on campus, President Claudine Gay initially remained stubborn in her defense of the university’s conduct before eventually resigning from her position in January. It was later revealed that she had committed numerous acts of plagiarism over the course of her career.
Other elite universities have recorded a similar trend with regards to declining applications.
Brown University also saw a 5% decrease compared to last year, while the University of California Berkeley saw a 1% decrease in the same time period.
All three universities are currently being investigated by the U.S. Department of Education over discrimination against Jewish students on campus, in addition to the ongoing investigation by the House Education and the Workforce Committee.
“Let all of US higher education be warned: If you don’t kick the radicals off campus and off the school’s board, shut down the DEI offices and focus on offering an education worth the cost of tuition, you could be next,”the New York Post wrote in an editorial Saturday.
Despite the decline in applications, Just The News reports that Harvard’s anti-Israel stance appears to still be strong.
The Harvard Law School Student Government passed a resolution last week calling for the school to divest from Israel and accusing the world’s only Jewish-majority country of committing “genocide.”
Ameristar Perimeter Security, the maker of the “wedge barrier,” deserves a round of applause this afternoon after its barrier stopped an unauthorized vehicle dead in its tracks at the front gate of the FBI Atlanta headquarters.
I want to talk about North Korea, but first we need to revisit El Salvador.
The Central American country’s decision to buy Bitcoin is looking good, despite almost universal skepticism from The Establishment when it was announced. Some of that skepticism ultimately proved accurate — legal tender status didn’t lead to mass adoption or cheaper remittances. But these motivations might have been red herrings all along.
President Bukele may have just wanted an excuse to acquire bitcoins for the government as part of their reserves. He was a bit overzealous and definitely too early in their purchases, but the decision paid off anyway. Not only has bitcoin appreciated in value, but El Salvador now has a part of its national savings in money that can’t be debased or confiscated.
This kind of diversification — not just of value, but also access — is something that every country wants.
Bitcoin is the first algorithmically minted, apolitical, and censorship-resistance currency in history. Its appeal grows as geopolitical tensions rise and economic crises become more frequent.
I wouldn’t be surprised if other countries are now also acquiring Bitcoin, though perhaps quietly. A smart buyer never tips their hand. The savviest nations might be mining it, and there are interesting rumors about certain Middle Eastern governments. Regardless of how any country acquires it, owning Bitcoin at the national level has proven worthwhile.
Which brings me to North Korea, a pariah nation whose acquisition strategy has relied on hacking and theft. I don’t buy all the exploits that are attributed to them, but the numbers are still substantial, especially for an otherwise poor country. North Korea’s holdings have never been officially acknowledged, but we still need to ask an important question: What happens when a “rogue” nation embraces crypto officially?
I think it’s only a matter of time until some do — at least Bitcoin — and the most likely candidates are sanctioned countries with energy reserves. Mining is the perfect solution for anyone with too much oil and not enough hard currency.
America is not going to like this. Bitcoin can be used as a workaround to dollar sanctions, and America increasingly weaponizes dollar access as a foreign policy tool. So she’ll try to expand those sanctions to crypto but this won’t be easy because Bitcoin is pseudonymous. Washington may then turn inward, pressuring domestic crypto companies to start censoring blacklisted wallets. Like most kinds of financial censorship (AML, KYC, etc) this won’t be very effective, except to make life harder for ordinary Americans using digital assets.
The utility of crypto abroad on the other hand won’t be impacted much. Unlike fiat money, where virtually every dollar transacted abroad must eventually clear back home, bitcoin transactions are settled globally. All it takes is for one miner anywhere to include a single transaction and it must be added to the chain — nodes that refuse will no longer be in consensus. Septuagenarian senators who take pride in their ignorance won’t understand this and go after American crypto companies who follow the rules of the protocol, but that won’t achieve anything.
America could force its own miners and exchanges to censor certain coins, but that would just give the upper hand to foreign competitors. Unlike fiat money, Bitcoin always finds a way. It’s a bit like quicksilver in that regard. One of the added benefits of government’s mining is that they can always mine their own transactions.
Perhaps even more importantly, America’s bumbling attempt to “control” crypto will make it even more obvious that nobody can, which is why governments want it in the first place. A domestic crackdown will be the ultimate advertising campaign for Bitcoin, leading to greater adoption.
Some of you might be wondering about the moral questions around “rogue adoption”, which do exist. But the problem is that the morality of economic sanctions — and all financial compliance for that matter — is ambiguous. The bad guys usually find a way, but the poor and powerless suffer.
Sanctions in particular have a dubious track record. There are not many examples of them leading to a desirable outcome, like regime change. Instead what usually happens is that tens of millions of people who are already victims of a brutal regime suffer even more. One could even argue sanctions strengthen such regimes by increasing the divide between the oppressed and the oppressor, and giving dictatorial thugs somebody else to blame for their failed state.
Kim Jung Un will not go hungry tonight, but many of his victims will. Is that moral? I’m not sure.
First Case Of Bird-Cow-Human Transmission Of Bird Flu Reported In Texas
The bird flu—also known as highly pathogenic avian influenza, or HPAI—is back, and this time, it’s infecting dairy herds across several states for the first time. There’s also a report that a Texas dairy worker tested positive for the virus.
On Friday, the US Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service reported that cows in Texas, Kansas, and Michigan have been infected with bird flu. There are indications that the virus is spreading to additional herds in New Mexico and Idaho.
“These findings mark the first time that HPAI has been detected in dairy cattle, and the second time the virus had been detected in a ruminant. On March 20, the Minnesota Board of Animal Health announced that the virus had been detected in samples from juvenile goats on a Minnesota farm where poultry had recently contracted the virus,” the American Veterinary Medical Association (AVMA) wrote in a press release last week.
AVMA President Rena Carlson said HPAI was first detected in goats “and now in dairy cattle, underscores the importance of adherence to biosecurity measures, vigilance in monitoring for disease.”
Bloomberg data shows that the number of “bird flu” mentions in corporate media news stories has just spiked to a one-year high.
“H5N1 has now been reported in cows in several states in the US. I wouldn’t be surprised if there are infections in cows in Europe too. Maybe people should start looking,” Florian Krammer, A professor at the Department of Microbiology at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, wrote on social media platform X.
H5N1 has now been reported in cows in several states in the US. I wouldn’t be surprised if there are infections in cows in Europe too. Maybe people should start looking.
According to the USDA, cows infected by bird flu have recovered “after isolation with little to no associated mortality reported.”
While infected cattle resulted in lower milk production, federal agencies have ensured that milk loss “is too limited to have a major impact on supply.”
E-commerce giant Amazon has just launched new tech that makes it far easier to sign up for its palm-scanning payment service, sparking renewed concerns among privacy experts, with some warning it’s another pebble in the growing rock pile of big tech-enabled, Orwell-style digital enslavement.
Amazon announced on March 28 that it had just launched a new app that lets first-time users of its Amazon One biometric payment service sign up for it from the comfort of their home (instead of having to do it at a physical store) by taking a photo of a hand and uploading it to Amazon’s servers.
“Until today, customers had to visit a physical location to hover their palm over an Amazon One device to sign up for the service,” the company said in a press release. “Now, they can sign up for Amazon One from home, work, or on-the-go.”
The benefit for users, according to Amazon, is convenience. Retailers are promised benefits from faster lines and “more frictionless in-store experience,” says Amazon, whose palm scanners are found in numerous retail locations across the country and have been used over 8 million times.
When Amazon first announced in 2020 that it was rolling out its biometric payment service, a number of privacy experts sounded the alarm, with some calling it a “terrible idea” because there are few laws to hold big tech accountable for keeping Americans’ sensitive personal information safe, or from preventing them from selling it to others or abusing it in other ways.
Now, the launch of Amazon’s new app that could turbo-charge the handing over of biometric data to a company with a history of data leaks and breaches, has drawn fresh criticism.
Much of the renewed criticism centers on the idea that Amazon is making it easier to harvest more personal data that could, potentially, be exploited as part of a tech-enabled system of social surveillance and control.
Amazon did not respond to a request for comment for this story.
‘Digital Cattle’
James Lindsay, founder of New Discourses and author of several books, including “Race Marxism” and “Social (In)justice,” told The Epoch Times that he sees the development as fresh evidence of a broader push towards tech-enabled “digital enslavement” by way of a series of nodes that includes central bank digital currencies (CBDC), universal basic income (UBI), and a China-style social credit system.
“It is real,” he said when asked about the risk of “digital enslavement” at the hands of a tech-driven constellation of mechanisms that includes China’s social credit system, which lets the communist-controlled surveillance state punish and reward people for certain behaviors, and which is being copied in a number of countries.
“We have not implemented the Chinese system here fully yet,” he said. “If we had, we wouldn’t be having this conversation.”
Mr. Lindsay offered commentary on the Amazon One app rollout in a post on X, writing that they “are pushing the Digital Slave ID really hard” and “I will not be digital cattle.”
He expanded on this idea in a subsequent thread, in which he laid out a case for how “evil technocrats” overlook people’s humanity and see consumers as little more than domesticated animals to be milked for profit or tapped for other uses.
“I am therefore saying that the technocrats will establish a system where we are as cattle to them, centers of data to be harvested,” he wrote in one of the posts.
The basic idea he outlined for how a “digital cattle” system would work effectively is thanks to several pieces: UBI, a social credit system that’s tied to financial rewards and punishments, a bonus system that sits on top of UBI that gives extra rewards for “excellent social credit,” as well as an “‘education’ system that locks kids in.”
Mr. Lindsey, who’s been a vocal critic of wokeism in education, added that the key to making the system of digital enslavement work is data.
“The oligarchs need enough information to know what their cattle need to keep functioning but also tons of information to know how to contour and control them into the ideal subjects and consumers their system needs to sustain itself,” he said in one of his posts.
Mr. Lindsay said this network of digital mechanisms of social control would be stacked against users, rewarding them in “extremely fake” and meaningless ways like in video games while the punishments could be very real.
“So, you don’t fly, you don’t travel, you eat bugs and lentils, you turn in your neighbors, you watch propaganda, you take the data-harvesting quizzes or play the data-harvesting games, etc., and you get special bonus credits above a basic allotment you can sell for perks,” he wrote.
While Amazon didn’t respond to a request for comment on the criticism of its artificial intelligence-powered palm-scanning payment service, it said in its announcement that it maintains a “high bar” for both customer privacy and data security.
The company says the images taken via the Amazon One app are encrypted and sent to a secure area on its cloud servers. The photos of users’ palms can’t be downloaded or saved to a phone, and the mobile app “includes additional layers of spoof detection,” the company says.
‘Closing Of The Totalitarian Circle’
Some critics have argued that fears of an Orwellian system of “digital enslavement” are overblown because there’s a slim chance of its adoption, given the public pushback to progressive phenomena like pushing Critical Race Theory in schools, or the foisting of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) policies on corporate workers.
“That’s the hope,” Mr. Lindsay said when asked for comment on the view that the bubble of wokeism is a fleeting excess of modern culture and is already popping.
“It’s only a hope,” he cautioned, however.
Asked how big the risk is of an Orwellian system of “digital enslavement” that treats people like “digital cattle” being implemented in the United States, Mr. Lindsay offered hope—but warned of risk.
The risk “is real,” he said. “But I am also optimistic that they’ve lost the ability to truly implement it if we keep exposing and speaking up about it.”
“If we do nothing, it is certain, however,” he added.
Michael Rectenwald, a former professor at New York University and a distinguished fellow at Hillsdale College, told The Epoch Times that the promise of convenience—the key benefit articulated by Amazon when introducing its new app—is a lure that draws people into arrangements that may not serve their more fundamental interests.
“The threat of complete digital enslavement will come via offers of ‘convenience’ and ‘inclusion’ from the corporate appendages of the state–or what I have called ‘governmentalities’—like Amazon and Google,” said Mr. Rectenwald, who’s also authored twelve books, including his latest, “The Great Reset and the Struggle for Liberty: Unraveling the Global Agenda.”
“Amazon’s palm scanning app is a step in the direction of digital identity,” he continued, adding that the Bank of International Settlements (BIS), the Swiss-based financial institution colloquially referred to as the “bank for central banks,” has stated that a “digital identity scheme” is a prerequisite for effective CBDCs.
“The BIS has also admitted that CBDCs allow complete transaction transparency,” he said. “Hinging access to money on a digital identity inclusive of a complete (political) profile–one can easily imagine the Orwellian possibilities that this would entail.”
“It represents the closing of the totalitarian circle.”
Bullish Bets On Gasoline Futs Soar As Pump-Prices Risk Rising To “Politically Sensitive” $4/Gallon Level
The latest surge in gasoline prices at the pump, something we detailed last week (read: here), could begin to impact the Biden administration’s reelection outlook unless the White House unleashes market interventions to arrest surging prices and prevent the national average cost of gas from breaching the critical level of $4/gallon.
Let’s begin with hedge fund positioning: These traders have pushed their bullish bets on gasoline futures in New York to the highest level in four years. New data from the Commodities Futures Trading Commission shows money managers raised net-long gasoline positions by 2,508 to 9,734, the highest level since March 2020.
Gasoline futures in New York have soared 36% since early December, reaching a seven-month high in recent sessions.
And given the 1-2 wek lag, that is a problem for pump-prices…
In a recent note to clients, Rapidan Energy Advisors explained how surging gas prices could complicate the outlook for the Biden administration:
“Low US gasoline inventories underpin our forecast for $3.70/gal average US pump prices this summer – below the politically sensitive $4.00/gal threshold, but not by much.
The US is approaching April with gasoline inventories at 232 mb – the low end of the recent five-year range and roughly in line with 2023 levels (see chart).
This and other factors in our new Refined Products Module (RPM) underpin our forecast for $3.70/gal US average gasoline prices in 3Q24 – a critical period for US politicians looking to get reelected in November.”
Rapidan pointed out:
“Washington and state capitals will consider market interventions (i.e., SPR draws, export limitations, gas tax holidays) if voter anger over high pump prices begins to boil.”
They added:
“Two swing states, Arizona and Nevada, typically have pump prices ~20% higher than the national average. Our forecast for $3.70/gal national average gasoline in 3Q24 would put retail prices above $4.50/gal in those states. Other swing states should have pump prices below $4.00/gal – good news for incumbents – but the margin for comfort is small, and any supply disruption this summer could send gasoline prices higher.”
The anticipation of additional market interventions by the White House to arrest fuel prices this summer and before the November elections comes as the administration is trying to refill the nation’s Strategic Petroleum Reserves after releasing a record amount to control last year’s summertime gas price spike.
Meanwhile, Ukrainian drone attacks are taking out critical Russian refineries, boosting the prospect of tighter global supplies of refined crude products. Traders are also spooked that Iran-backed Houthis could be several steps away from targeting Saudi refineries. We penned this in a note titled “Dominoes Falling As Biden Admin Deals With Twin Energy Crisis In Russia, Middle East.”
Pennsylvania rules that require mail-in ballots to be dated are legal, a federal appeals court has ruled.
A state law that says voters must fill out, date, and sign envelopes containing the ballots is not prevented by the Civil Rights Act of 1964, a majority said in the March 27 ruling.
The act bans denying “the right of any individual to vote in any election because of an error or omission on any record or paper relating to any application, registration or other act requisite to voting.”
But that provision “only applies when the state is determining who may vote,” U.S. Circuit Court Judge Thomas Ambro, appointed by former President Bill Clinton, wrote for the majority of a U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit panel. “In other words, its role stops at the door of the voting place. The provision does not apply to rules, like the date requirement, that govern how a qualified voter must cast his ballot for it to be counted.”
The same court ahead of the 2022 election ruled that state officials must count undated ballots but the U.S. Supreme Court vacated that order. After the state’s acting secretary of state said counties should still count undated ballots, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruled that counties could not count mail-in ballots with missing or incorrect dates. About 7,900 ballots were not counted in the 2020 election because they were missing a signature or date, or had an inaccurate date, according to state officials.
U.S. District Judge Susan Paradise Baxter later ruled that the Pennsylvania law violated the Civil Rights Act provision, meaning Pennsylvania officials had to count mail-in ballots even if they lacked dates, or contained inaccurate dates.
“Federal law prohibits a state from erecting immaterial roadblocks, such as this, to voting,” Judge Baxter, appointed by former President Donald Trump, wrote at the time, referring to the Pennsylvania law.
According to the law, a voter casting a ballot by mail must mark the ballot, then place it inside a provided envelope. That envelope must then be placed into a second envelope, which contains the areas for the date and signature.
“The elector shall then fill out, date and sign the declaration printed on such envelope,” the law states.
The Republican National Committee (RNC) and other groups appealed Judge Baxter’s ruling, arguing that her conclusion was wrong.
“This is a crucial victory for election integrity and voter confidence in the Keystone State and nationwide. Pennsylvanians deserve to feel confident in the security of their mail ballots, and this 3rd Circuit ruling roundly rejects unlawful left-wing attempts to count undated or incorrectly dated mail ballot,” Michael Whatley, the RNC’s chairman, said in a statement after the new ruling was handed down.
Groups that sued over the law expressed disappointment.
“If this ruling stands, thousands of Pennsylvania voters could lose their vote over a meaningless paperwork error. The ballots in question in this case come from voters who are eligible and who met the submission deadline,“ Mike Lee, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Pennsylvania, said in a statement. ”In passing the Civil Rights Act, Congress put a guardrail in place to be sure that states don’t erect unnecessary barriers that disenfranchise voters. It’s unfortunate that the court failed to recognize that principle. Voters lose as a result of this ruling.”
The ruling can be appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, but the groups have not yet indicated whether they’ll appeal.
Justice Samuel Alito has said that the Pennsylvania law did not appear to violate the Civil Rights Act provision because it did not deny people the right to vote.
“When a mail-in ballot is not counted because it was not filled out correctly, the voter is not denied ’the right to vote,’” he said previously. “Rather, that individual’s vote is not counted because he or she did not follow the rules for casting a ballot.”
Several other justices supported his view, offered in a dissent when the rest of the court initially said Pennsylvania counties could keep counting undated ballots.
Judge Ambro offered similar rationale, writing that the provision “targets laws that restrict who may vote” and “does not preempt state requirements on how qualified voters may cast a valid ballot, regardless what (if any) purpose those rules serve.”
He was joined by U.S. Circuit Judge Cindy Chung, who was appointed by President Joe Biden.
U.S. Circuit Judge Patty Shwartz, an appointee of President Barack Obama and the third member of the panel that ruled, said in a dissent that the provision “means that state actors cannot deprive a voter of the right to vote due to an error or omission he makes on papers that he must complete to have his ballot counted, including on papers distinct from application or registration forms, if the mistake is not relevant to the State’s ability to ascertain whether he is qualified under state law to vote in the election.”