Full disclosure at the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel

Er, not quite.

"Walker returns $170,000 to business group's PAC," it says here: "Metropolitan Milwaukee Association of Commerce says it misunderstood GAB guidance on giving." Did you know that Steven J. Smith, chairman of the board and chief executive officer of Journal Communications, Inc., which owns both the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel and the insufferable dissembler Charlie Sykes, and whose local teevee station plays weekly host to sleazy hacks like Brian Sikma of Media Trackers, is also an officer on the board of directors with the Metropolitan Milwaukee Association of Commerce? Well, you may have known it but you wouldn't have known by reading the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel.

And it's not the first time you wouldn't have known it either.

Incidentally MMAC chairman Ulice Payne, Jr. conducted a panel I attended during orientation week at Marquette University Law School which turned out to be devoted exclusively to Payne's glorifying "how much money you will make." Payne, who at the time was a partner at Foley & Lardner, brought along a new associate with the firm and recent graduate of MULS. Payne instructed the young woman to tell the audience what her starting salary was and warned her that if she didn't provide this information then he would. It was a display so unseemly that I had to leave the hall and thence avoid the rest of orientation week.

That's an ostensibly Catholic institution, by the way, so perhaps Payne was emphasizing "how much money you will make" so you can give lots of it to charity. But I doubt it because Payne further emphasized that $10K of the new attorney's compensation was in clothing allowance, and the young associate wasn't exactly dressed in sackcloth (nor was Payne).

This while the State Bar of Wisconsin labors to disabuse the popular perception of attorneys as money-grubbing. Deftly played, Mr. Payne.

Teach those baby lawyers well.