Fox News: More on higher gas prices

My piece at Fox News discusses the high energy prices starts this way:

On Friday, President Obama announced that he was “making sure that my Attorney General is paying attention to potential speculation in the oil markets.” 23 Senators and 45 congressmen, all Democrats except for one independent, are calling for urgent action against the “speculators” they hold responsible.
These members of congress want the Commodity Futures Trading Commission to use its new regulatory powers under a law Obama signed two years ago to limit the amount of oil that speculators can buy.
This isn’t a new concern.
During the 2008 presidential campaign, Obama campaigned against "the special interest politics that put the interests of Big Oil and speculators ahead of the interests of working people," and surely implied that an Obama administration would end these high prices by clamping down on speculation.
Possibly that is why a new Washington Post/ABC News survey released on Monday shows that soaring gas prices have taken a toll on Obama, with 50 percent of American's strongly disapproving of Obama's economic performance -- the highest in the poll's history. . . .

Interestingly, Energy Secretary Steven Chu walks away from his past support for higher energy prices, though is it a political conversion? Or is he just qualifying it so much that he is only walking away from it temporarily. It seems pretty clear that it is the later.

"Let me first respond to your first statement, Senator," Chu said. "Since I walked in the door as Secretary of Energy, I have been doing everything in my powers to do what we can to reduce -- as we see these gas prices spike -- to reduce these prices. And the administration, the president, and I personally, yes we do acknowledge and feel the pain of not only American consumers, but American businesses when they see these prices increase."

"Are you saying that you no longer share the view that we need to figure out how to boost gasoline prices in America?" Lee asked

"I no longer share that view," Chu said.

"You did then, but don't now?" asked Lee.

"When I became Secretary of Energy, I represented the U.S. government and I think that right now, in this economic very slow but -- you know, return that we need to have these prices … will effect the comeback of our economy and we're very worried about that. So of course we don’t want the price of gasoline to go up, we want it to go down.” . . .