House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) held a briefing to speak with children and their parents on “Take Your Kid to Work Day,” but did not pass on an opportunity to allege President Bush of not doing enough to lower high gas prices beforehand. Pelosi called on the President to suspend purchases of oil for the Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR), which she said could lower gas prices from anywhere between 5 to 24 cents a gallon. Speaker Pelosi said that more affordable gas prices would provide our economy with the “critical” first step it needs to rebuild our dreary financial situation. Watching the Speaker interact with the children at the conference was both humorous and intriguing. Asking simplistic questions, as well as questions that their reporter parents wrote down for them to ask, the children forced Pelosi to discuss everything from her favorite baseball team (she said the San Francisco Giants) to how she would rate our economy on a scale of one to ten (she said, as an “optimist”, it was about a three). One of the children asked Pelosi who the next President should be and she said “a Democrat.” She told the children that meeting the Pope last week was “thrilling and intellectually challenging” and that freedom of the press was one of the most important aspects of American democracy.