The BBC, a few weeks ago:

US light crude settled at a record closing price of $51.09 on Tuesday, up $1.18, having hit a $51.29 high....

Traders said the market had responded to a US Department of the Interior report stating that more than 15 million barrels from the Gulf had been disrupted over the past three weeks by the hurricanes....

Some traders have blamed the latest price rises on market speculators. "It is speculation, pure speculation," said Fadel Gheit, market analyst with Oppenheimer. "It is a bubble like the internet bubble. It is not justified by supply or demand."

News Interactive, today:

CRUDE oil futures rose to a record in New York for a third day on speculation US demand for heating oil would deplete supplies this winter.

"Consumer demand is still very robust on the heating oil side and this is what's really driving these markets into a frenzy," said Arjuna Mahendran, Singapore-based chief Asian strategist at Credit Suisse Private Banking.

Prices have risen in 19 of the past 22 sessions.

(Remember, they're just guessing the reason behind the speculation they see driving up oil prices. All know they know for sure is that they see speculative trading driving up the oil prices; the reasons suggested are analyst's interpretations.)

Recently, Don Luskin has been pursuing an interesting lead: Apparently, he feels, someone has been gaming the election-outcome shares on TradeSports:

There have now been four separate "speculative attacks" on the market in futures contracts on Bush's re-election probabilities traded online at the Dublin-based website Tradesports.com....

The attacks involved massive sell orders placed by a single individual -- the same individual all four times -- according to a spokesman for Tradesports. Each attack caused a massive temporary drop in the price of the Bush re-election futures. The most recent one, last Friday at about 1:30 EDT, whacked the Bush futures from a price of 54 (indicating the market's estimate of a 54% probability of Bush's re-election) all the way down to a price of 10 (indicating a 10% probability) -- in just eight minutes. Six minutes later the futures were back to 54. That's the equivalent of an 8000-point crash in the Dow Jones Industrial Average -- followed by an 8000 point recovery, all within 14 minutes.

Four attacks. One individual.

I'm no expert, but I'd guess there were probably quite a number of people who had enough cash to game TradeSports. And it seems like kind of a minor aspect of my life, anyway. But there were some reader responses that did raise my eyebrows:

Many readers have asked whether it's possible that Soros is manipulating the oil futures market, driving it higher to make Bush look bad. Well, I have no direct information on this. But as a long-time trader, I can tell you for sure that the oil market has speculation and manipulation written all over it. Could it be Soros? Sure. It might be. No evidence that it is. But it certainly could be.

Oil? Now, that's intriguing. And scary. As you can see above, it appears there are a lot of people -- not just Luskin -- who feel that high prices we're seeing now do have a singificant speculative component.

It sure could be Soros.

That's not paranoid to suggest: Here's a man who has single-handedly bankrupted the Bank of England to become wealthy, and also single-handed touched off the huge Asian crash and depression of the 90s through speculative monetary trading (arbitrage).

Would the man who has appointed himself "American's conscience" be willing and able to cost you at the fuel pump in order to get what he wants?

It's certainly not dissimilar to things he's done to the millions of citizens of other countries in the past. He's repeatedly stated he wants a powerful global government, and it stands to reason that Kerry is more in line with those plans that Bush.

Creepy.

If there any truth to this-- and I'm no expert -- but I'd guess we should look for an steady high level or increase as we go into the final weeks running up to the election, and a big drop afterwards.