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Honolulu Lite
Charles Memminger
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What is Ron thinking?
I THOUGHT it odd that state Sen. Ron Menor intended to run for Congress based in part on his authorship of Hawaii's zany gas cap law.
Ron, buddy, I hate to break it to you, but most people hate the gas cap law. They think it's not only stupid and ineffective, but it makes Hawaii look puerile and naive to anyone who ever passed Economics 101.
Menor curiously avows that the gas cap has saved people money, when anyone who has filled up a car or truck in the past year knows that simply isn't true. I don't know which gas stations Ron frequents, but they aren't the ones on my side of the island. Maybe he's referring to the people who put their cars up on blocks and started taking the bus or biking to work. I guess the gas cap saved those guys some money.
The gas cap law certainly has been no picnic for owners of gas station/minimarts. With the wild fluctuations of gas prices week to week, these poor folks can't even figure out how much beer, cigarettes and ice to order.
THE TRUTH, Ron, is that gas prices got so unnecessarily high at one point last year that if it hadn't been for the gas cap law allowing distributors to legally jack up prices, the attorney general would have charged them with price gouging.
So when Menor not only announced he would be running to fill the congressional seat to be vacated by Ed Case, but considered his creation of the gas cap law would help him win, you could have knocked me over with a gas pump nozzle. Ron, dude, why don't you campaign on the gas cap law, the bottle bill AND camera-van speeding enforcement and make your platform a true trifecta of idiocy?
In claiming the gas cap law as his personal campaign issue, Menor apparently has assured that not only will he not get elected to Congress, he might not even hold onto his legislative seat. Unless he's mastered some Vulcan mind-control tricks to convince voters that they actually were saving money while paying $4 a gallon for gas, it's going to be a tough campaign.
What will make it even harder for Menor is the fact that now a lot of his fellow Democratic legislators want to scrap the gas cap. It appears that the members of the state House, reaching a level of sanity rarely seen inside the big, square building, will soon pass a measure to repeal the odious law.
Menor's only hope for higher office will be to somehow convince his fellow state senators that all of the House members and most island automobile owners are in the grips of mass hallucination and that it's actually a good thing to usurp a free-market economic system in favor of a type of ham-handed governmental meddling that even Russia wouldn't attempt today. That's the only way the repeal can be dashed.
If anyone is hallucinating, it appears to be Menor, who is afraid that a repeal would be seen as appeasing oil companies. Ron, mi amigo, the oil companies LOVE this gas cap. Tessoro has made record profits since the gas cap went into effect. If you play your cards right, it will be Tesoro Petroleum employees out waving campaign signs for you. (Gosh, if he can get a gas cap in Hawaii, think what he can do when he gets to Congress! A national gas cap! Comrades, we'll make zillions!)
There are many good reasons to repeal the gas-cap law -- keeping Ron Menor from going to Congress being just an auxiliary blessing. The best reason is knowing that if gas ever gets above $4 a gallon in Hawaii when the rest of the country is paying $2.50, somebody here is gonna go to jail.
Charles Memminger, the National Society of Newspaper Columnists' 2004 First Place Award winner for humor writing, appears Sundays, Tuesdays, Thursdays and Fridays. E-mail
cmemminger@starbulletin.com