House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi went sharply after oil speculation late yesterday, taking up a strategy to answer Republicans on rising gas prices that has not been employed much in the political sphere.

David Dayen, born on 2.12, provides a round up of the news you might have missed from 2.12.12, including stories on the still undefined bank settlement, Komen Foundation, Maine caucus, jobs reports, an alternative to Keystone, Syria, Iran, gas prices, women in combat and much more.

This is a bind for Republicans, who have no Plan B if the economy improves. But there are non-insulting-to-the-intelligence ways of describing the employment situation in America. This just saps any belief that these are people with one shred of sense about the economy.

The biggest reason I can find for economic optimism in 2012 is a belief that people will eventually have to buy new cars and form households, so why not this year? That appears to be the animating thought behind Matt Yglesias’ cheery forecast in the new year. But the economic story is a lot more mixed.

There may be ongoing claims that will drain out a bit more money. But it won’t be much more than 20% of the total funds negotiated that will be used. I don’t know whether this can be attributed to program eligibility or a lack of publicity or bad design. But that number seems quite low compared to the devastation that BP wreaked upon the Gulf Coast.

Sanders went so far as to accuse Gensler of breaking the law for not implementing the Dodd-Frank regulation on position limits. He cited the now well-worn quote by Exxon Mobil CEO Rex Tillerson, that the price of oil under regular market conditions should be $60-$70 a barrel (it’s currently trading at around $100). Sanders also cited the recent lawsuits from the CFTC against Parnon Energy, Arcadia Petroleum and Arcadia Energy for driving up prices during the spike of 2008, and stated that the same conditions exist today.

It took the Obama Administration years to build a case against a few financial firms for their role in the 2008 oil spike, but at least they’ve gotten around to it. The people most equipped to know the existence of the problem were screaming to the government at the time that speculation, not supply and demand, was driving prices.

The Commodity Futures Trading Commission charged one trading house and two individuals for illegally manipulating oil prices during the price spike of 2008, when oil reached $147 a barrel, by creating the appearance of a shortage to drive up the benchmark for crude. While the action covers oil trading in 2008, the connection to today, where speculation is seen as a primary cause for higher gas prices, is unmistakable.

President Obama announced in his weekly address a plan to open part of the National Petroleum Reserve in Alaska to oil drilling. Through an executive order, the President would also extend leases in the Gulf of Mexico for oil concerns that were subject to the moratorium on deepwater drilling after the BP oil disaster, as well as speeding up evaluation of resources in the Atlantic, extending other leases in Alaska and building incentives for oil and gas companies to use land they own on existing leases on land and sea.

It was inevitable that oil-producing states would get representation like this. And yet every state is a gas-consumer state. Every state is a taxpayer state. Every state has constituents who give their money to the government so a sliver of it can be handed over to the same billionaires who charge $4 a gallon for gasoline. And these billionaires are the same people who think being denied that corporate welfare is actually un-American.