One would think that with the County winning a $45 million settlement from their lawsuit against the Mercer actuaries, there would at least be a little apology squeaking out from the editors down at the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel.

Don’t hold your breath.

The Journal-Sentinel shares some damning guilt in what happened back in 2001.

No one in the printed media has ever taken the time to look at the information that Supervisors were given. It’s much easier to print sensationalism. It’s much easier to make claims that Supervisors didn’t read the information they were given than to actually cite the lines they were supposed to read. The reason? Those lines don’t exist. The Journal-Sentinel did a hatchet job several years ago in order to sell newspapers; not to expose the truth. Will this lawsuit, where Mercer admits nothing and the County settles for a fraction of what was lost result in Milwaukee County Executive Scott Walker admitting that he lied when he smeared the Democrats in County Government in order to further his own craven lust for power?

Of course not.

Will it result in an apology editorial from the Journal-Sentinel to those removed from office due to Walker’s allegations?

Let’s not hold our breath.

There’s a reason they call it “public service” and it’s not always fun. Of course if it were like taking a trip to Disneyland, people would be lining up at the City Halls and Courthouses around the country to take out nomination papers to run.

I’m talking about serving in public office.

Oh sure, there are the good times. It’s a rush to finally gather enough votes to get a policy of yours through whatever legislative body you would so choose, and it’s nice to talk to people whose lives you have truly improved in some substantial way but it’s not all good times. You have to run for office, deal with obnoxious liars and be subject to an alarming amount of criticism, some of it though the media. There are many who will think they own you for your years in service and confuse even your personal time for required years of servitude to them. You’ll also miss out on time with friends and family that only someone else who has been in office can appreciate.

But all that gives a person a better understanding of what it takes to run a government. I’m talking about basic civics here. Yes, you may have had civics in High School, but being in office is like civics class on steroids.

It’s been years since I’ve served, but I can still look back on some of those times with fond memories as well as a sense of accomplishment. Does that mean I’d do it again? This summer I’ll have a chance to do something I just wasn’t able to do when in office — go camping with friends. Today I’ll spend time on this sunny day fishing a little with my son on a lake and having a few martinis with family in the evening. With every passing year, I’m enjoying my personal time more and more.

They’re both hardcore Republican activists masquerading as impartial information providers. Both have had talk radio shows and now both talk show host Charlie Sykes and Milwaukee Magazine columnist Jessica McBride have had extramarital affairs.

While both have made their living wagging fingers at others, neither can be accused of discretion. While Sykes picked an opera singer to hook up with while still being married to now Appeals Judge Diane Sykes, McBride was smitten by power. McBride, who has lectured on journalistic ethics while teaching classes at UW-Milwaukee, chose Milwaukee Police Chief Ed Flynn who she was writing a story on.

Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel reporter Dan Bice, who broke the story of the affair, cites this little nugget of correspondence between the two — “Warm, no not warm, hot memories of beautiful moments … I feel younger today than I did last night.”

It’s time to light a few candles and cue up the Barry White.

McBride’s editor at Milwaukee Magazine is Bruce Murphy who has taken some journalistic liberties of his own over the past few years. According to Bice’s story, Murphy seems to care little that McBride was carrying on a tryst with the Chief while she was writing the story “the Cop who can’t stop.”

McBride is married to former Waukesha County District Attorney Paul Bucher and while Bucher no longer wields the power of the law, Flynn does. How does that affect McBride?

“I feel younger today than I did last night.”

Apparently, power really is an aphrodisiac.

Sometimes I read a column and just have to comment.

Today, I’m just going to link you to a site that tells the whole story. Amazing stuff.

I would like to think the best of people and I would like to believe that journalists don’t lie. I would like to think that the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel was moving in a direction where they would step away from their McCarthyism style distortions of the past and report the story of the pension scandal honestly. I would like to say they refuse to embrace tabloid style yellow journalism.

After reading one of the more recent Steve Schulze columns, I’m not going to be holding my breath.

Get this — one of their recent story headlines is “Ordinans’ account shifts on knowledge of backdrop costs”. One would think from that headline that former County Board Chairman Karen Ordinans knew of the oncoming train wreck and decided to intentionally keep the problems of the costly and now-infamous backdrop pension benefit from her colleagues.

A little context is in order here.

While the JS reports Ordinans “learned from Dobbert that the backdrop was supposed to cost $718,000″ and, Schulze alleges Ordinans didn’t tell other Supervisors “because the $718,000 was such a very minimal number I wasn’t even thinking of it as a cost.”

Why do I say “alleges”? Because Schulze has a tough time grasping more than one simple issue at a time. Always looking for the worst in people, he’s not beyond making up his facts to get a story. So even his assertion that Ordinans said what he alleges she said has to be called into question.

And even if Ordinans did say that (which I question), why would she have? Could it be that it’s because the County has a billion dollar budget and $718,000 represented less than 1% of that budget? Could it be because training and hiring costs for the large amount of county employees would have exceeded that $718,000 versus the whole reason the pension plan was approved in the first place (to encourage veteran employees from retiring at a time of economic prosperity when it was difficult to fill positions with quality candidates)?

It’s difficult to wrap our minds, in today’s recession with high unemployment rates, that economic prosperity was once so strong and unemployment so low that the county couldn’t find enough quality employees. But that was the case and that perspective was never shared.

Sadly, very little of the real story was ever told in the Journal-Sentinel.

While there have been plenty of chicken littles complaining about a smoking ban, the reality is that the passage of the smoking ban will help hundreds of thousands of people who suffer from respiratory illnesses and far more people from developing health problems.

But who would have thought just 5 years ago that an overwhelmingly large bipartisan group of legislators would have come together to pass a smoking ban in workplaces including bars and restaurants by 2010.

Having just returned from a trip to Ireland, I can share that their smoking ban has not had any ill effects on the volume of people bellying up to the bar. At first, there was resistance to the idea just as there has been here, but the Irish have adapted to not going home from a night at the pubs smelling like an ash tray.

It will be a crisis and people will stop going to taverns, especially in Northern Wisconsin, detractors to the newly passed bill have said. Why then are Irish pubs still packed?

While I don’t go out to bars as much as I have a decade or so ago, I can tell you one of the things that keeps me away — the smoke. I know that if I go out to most bars that I will come home smelling like a cigarette and suffering from red eyes and burning lungs. I don’t say this because of some sort of random guess — this is what I experience nearly every time I go out. I will even avoid going out to several bars past an 6pm because I know they’ll be smoky and unbearable.

In Ireland, I could go into a pub with my son and not worry that it will trigger an asthma attack. I can go into a pub with my wife and not worry about how the smoke will trigger a coughing fit from all of the smoke.

So is this ban good? You bet it is. Not only for pubic health, but this ban is good for business.