No good deed goes unpunished

The Journal Sentinel has outdone itself today in fulfilling its mission to assure that all front page news about Gov. Jim Doyle is bad news.

Doyle's order Tuesday to stop enforcing the state minimum markup law on ethanol-based gasoline should have been a positive story if there ever was one.

Bureaucracy runs amok, tries to make service stations charge more. Governor steps in to do the right thing and hold down prices for consumers, who are paying more and more at the pump. He got a pretty neutral to mildly positive story the first day.

But today, the newspaper managed to twist the issue to feature two negative stories on top of page one. One said the move wouldn't affect prices much. The other suggested Doyle had only acted as a political ploy because Rep. Mark Green had issued a press release on the subject.

Here's the "evidence" of Doyle's dastardly political move:

At 11 a.m. Tuesday, Doyle said he didn't know if he could tell state regulators to not enforce the minimum markup law on ethanol-based gasoline. The law, written decades ago when all gas was totally derived from oil, requires a 9.18% markup from wholesalers to retailers. His lawyers were studying the issue, the governor said Tuesday morning.

A few hours later, he ordered state regulators not to enforce the minimum markup law on ethanol blends.

Between Doyle's late-morning uncertainty and his mid-afternoon action, his Republican challenger for governor, U.S. Rep. Mark Green of Green Bay, issued a news release that challenged him on the issue.

Were the two - Green's challenge and Doyle's swift response - related?

I have no inside information, and have no contact with the governor's office or campaign these days. But I know Doyle well enough that think I can confidently answer the question: No.

In all likelihood, what transpired between Doyle's first statement and his decision to issue the order was that he got his question answered. Doyle is a lawyer, a cautious man when it comes to the law. My guess is that he either got legal advice that he could issue the order, or, as sometimes happens, he went to the state statutes himself and decided the law did not apply to ethanol products.

It might be helpful to recall that this issue arose when the owner of an ethanol pump in Monroe complained that state price police were trying to make him raise prices.

That story ran on the Associated Press wire, and sparked a lot of comment. I mentioned it here at 10:25 Tuesday morning.

An equally likely scenario is that Doyle read my blog item sometime after 11 a.m. and was moved to act.

Or how about this one: The governor, and his office, read the papers, too. Doyle has been against the minimum markup law since he was Dane County DA in the 1970s. A bill was introduced in the last session of the legislature to repeal minimum markup, and Doyle said he would sign it if it passed. But Mark Green's Republican cronies, who control the legislature, killed the bill.

So when Doyle read or heard about the latest outrageous enforcement of the law, he checked to see whether he could stop it. When he got the green light, he acted.

Apparently, if he had read Green's press release, he should have done nothing, because doing the right thing just resulted in a claim that he was only acting for political gain.

By the way, despite the other story, with all of the people who like the minimum markup law saying it wouldn't affect prices much, the Monroe station owner who started the whole thing said he had reduced prices 20 cents a gallon on unleaded regular gas with 10% ethanol.

No wonder more and more Democrats are referring to the newspaper as the Urinal Slantinel.

UPDATE: There are two sides to every story, even in the same newspaper.