In reaction to the March 26 blog’s lead item on House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (“Call Nancy Pelosi The Giant of the House”), the following comment was posted by a “Jerry,” who was trying to reassure nervous ErieBlogs users that I was not a credible threat to hijack the site for my own nefarious political agenda.

Here is the post in case you didn’t see it:

I wouldn’t complain too much about the political commentary on this site. It’s not as if Bryan Oberle is offering his own opinion, but rather he’s cut-and-pasting “tastes” of other people’s opinions and indulging in a hefty helping of me-too-ism.

The Ezra Klein article is particularly poor anyway. The bill will be upheld as constitutional because conservatives and Republicans have supported individual mandates? What? Citing the legality of the Massachusetts mandate is fine if you can’t grasp federalism.

In any case, this is why journalists make poor commentators anyway. They went to school to learn how to write commentary, but they lack the knowledge base to make intelligent commentary. Bias? Let’s call it laziness instead. Bryan Oberle thinks one way because Ezra Klein thinks that way because Dave Weigel thinks that way. The cut-and-pasting that Bryan uses makes that all too clear.

Now I’m not going to go to the mats over Jerry’s dissing journalists for being “poor commentators.” More often than not, deciding what is good or bad commentary depends on whether you agree with the commentator’s view. And Washington Post domestic affairs blogger and Newsweek columnist Ezra Klein doesn’t need any defending by me, although I still haven’t heard any independent or credible view that Republicans have a chance in hell of convincing federal courts that Congress doesn’t have the constitutional standing to pass comprehensive health-care reform.

As for the cut and pasting from other blogs or newspaper articles that Jerry mentioned, guilty I plead.

In the process of starting up this blog two months ago, I’ve established a basic blog format. I will write a lead item, roughly around 800 words or so, which not un-coincidently is the average size of your basic newspaper column.

Sometimes I will add a link or two to this lead item, pointing out something, let’s say, Andrew Sullivan on the Daily Dish blog wrote or linked. In the case of the Pelosi item, I offered two links for interested readers. I also broke out sections from the links to offer readers a chance to read another view. This is common practice in numerous blogs, including the Daily Dish, the New Republic, the Talking Points Menu and the Washington Journal.

Forgive me, but I like the format.

Bear with me here. I approached this blog as a writer who wrote newspaper columns of various forms for nearly 25 years. So naturally, I basically see a blog as a column that doesn’t run in a newspaper.

I prefer long, varied blogs that touch on numerous points and issues: politics, sports, movies, local news, the Erie Times-News, my wife and daughter, my extended newspaper family and friends.

I also liked the user-friendly way the Daily Dish makes a brief point – then offers concurring and dissenting blog links that offer readers the opportunity to continue or build on the debate.

So if Jerry views this blog as nothing more than cut and paste vehicle that makes me no danger to the political purity of ErieBlogs.com, that’s great. I would point out that the Pelosi lead item was roughly 80 percent my words and thoughts, and 20 percent excerpts from the links to the New Republic’s Jonathan Chait and Talking Point Menu.

In the next three items in the 2,200 word blog, I did offer more views from outside links than my own perspectives. That’s because the stories or issues presented struck me as materials worth looking at for readers with the time and inclination to go read them.

Some might, at this point, ask a simple question: Just what is a blog? Good question. For the sake of argument, let’s use online encyclopedia Wikopedia’s definition as a starting point for a blog definition:

A blog (a contraction of the term “web log“) is a type of website, usually maintained by an individual with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material such as graphics or video. Entries are commonly displayed in reverse-chronological order. “Blog” can also be used as a verb, meaning to maintain or add content to a blog. Many blogs provide commentary or news on a particular subject; others function as more personal online diaries. A typical blog combines text, images, and links to other blogs, Web pages, and other media related to its topic. The ability of readers to leave comments in an interactive format is an important part of many blogs. Most blogs are primarily textual, although some focus on art (Art blog), photographs (photoblog), videos (Video blogging), music (MP3 blog), and audio (podcasting). Microblogging is another type of blogging, featuring very short posts.

This strikes me as an outstanding description for blogs. They come in all shapes and sizes. Or, perhaps more to the point here, blogs are any darn thing an individual blogger wants them to become.

So in my case, I start a weekly blog off with a newspaper-like column lead item, and offer a few links and breakout items to either bolster a point or offer a contrasting view. This is flexibility most newspapers can’t offer due to space concerns and a generally misplaced belief that readers won’t read anything longer than 300 words.

I offer my views – for what their worth – in that main lead newspaper-like item and sprinkle more thoughts and perspective throughout the blog while focusing on offering interesting and useful links and breakouts.

Please let me know what you think.

Postscript: More evidence that Republican attorney generals are throwing away taxpayer dollars in a reckless losers’ huff over health-care reform, here is the Washington Monthly’s Steve Benen in his Political Animal.

FRIVOLOUS HCR LAWSUIT’S SCARCE DEFENDERS…. Finding an ambitious, far-right state attorney general willing to waste tax dollars challenging the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act is easy. Finding legal experts who think their case has any merit at all is surprisingly difficult.

The University of Washington tried to organize a debate on whether the health-care reform bill is constitutional. But it couldn’t find a law professor to argue that it isn’t, reports the Seattle Times.

“I will say that we tried very hard to get a professor who could come and who thinks this is flat-out unconstitutional,” said the moderator. “But there are relatively few of them, and they are in great demand.”

Even a former Bush/Cheney U.S. attorney was on hand, and he agreed that the Republican litigation not only lacks merit, but should be “seen as a political exercise.”

Elsewhere, however, Republicans continue to take the frivolous lawsuit seriously. In Georgia, for example, state Attorney General Thurbert Baker (D) said he would not waste taxpayer money on the case that no serious person can defend. As of yesterday, 31 Republicans in the state legislature had signed a resolution calling for the AG’s impeachment. Seriously.

“It’s a disappointing response by some members of our legislature,” Baker said. “I don’t think it speaks well for the future of this state or the image of Georgia.”

You don’t say.

As of now, 14 states, thanks to conservative attorneys general with time and public resources to waste, are pushing a lawsuit against the new health care law that even conservative legal experts consider a weak joke. It was 13, but Indiana’s AG signed on this week.

‘Wrong-way Will’ Challenged On Absurd Filibuster Position

George Will is a good columnist – when he isn’t trying to be a political pundit or commenting on world climate change. In my former post as Erie Times-News Editorial Page Editor, I ran Will (and political columnist David Broder) on Thursdays and Sundays for 10 years.

Will, unlike, let’s say, Charles Krauthammer, who I ran as well in the Erie Times-News Op-ed Pages after a trade up from Cal Thomas, generally avoids being a Republican partisan. Recall that Will was one of the first conservative columnists to identify the Iraq war as a major American foreign policy blunder. He also quickly turned on the American war in Afghanistan while later warning President Obama to get the hell out of Dodge.

But on Feb. 25 in the Washington Post (When the filibuster is the enemy) as the Republican minority in the U.S. Senate continued to use the filibuster as an unprecedented obstructionist weapon, Will’s strange column defending GOP senators wallowed in partisan shrillness. It couldn’t make any sense otherwise.

A taste:

Liberals say filibusters confuse and frustrate the public. The public does indeed mistakenly believe that government is designed to act quickly in compliance with presidential wishes. But most ideas incubated in the political cauldron of grasping factions are deplorable. Therefore, serving the public involves – mostly involves – saying “no.” The Bill of Rights, like traditional conservatism, effectively pronounces the lovely word “no” regarding many possible government undertakings – establishment of religion, unreasonable searches and seizures, etc.

The fiction that government is “paralyzed” by partisanship is regularly refuted. Presidents Reagan, Clinton and Bush reached across party lines in 1986, 1996 and 2001 to pass tax reform, welfare reform and No Child Left Behind, respectively. The $700 billion Troubled Assets Relief Program and the $862 billion stimulus were enacted with injudicious speed.

Invaluable New Yorker editor Hedrick Hertzberg didn’t buy what Will was selling in his ludicrous filibuster defense. Hertzberg’s response is worth checking out at Wrong Way Will.

A taste:

At a minimum, then, if words have meaning, the filibuster rule’s requirement for sixty per cent of the entire Senate membership, no matter how many senators are out sick or what have you, is patently unconstitutional. Of course, that doesn’t mean that the Supreme Court is about to declare it unconstitutional. Even a Court not dominated by ideologues willing to appoint Presidents by fiat would hesitate to reach that deeply into the innards of the Senate.

The fact that the Senate “may determine the Rules of its Proceedings” does not mean that the rules of the Senate are the highest law of the land. Those rules, after all, can be changed by a simple majority at the outset of a new Congress. Would it be permissible for such a majority to adopt a rule that cloture can be invoked—or bills passed, or some other “business” conducted — only with the concurrence of ninety per cent of the Senate? Or a hundred per cent? Mr. Will?

One more observation on this point. The filibuster also makes nonsense of the provision in Article I, Section 3 that allows the Vice-President to cast a vote when the Senate is “equally divided.” If the Senate is “equally divided” on a motion to end debate, the motion simply fails. So the filibuster rule decrees.

Pennsylvania  Government Is Really Bad,  But There Is Illinois

I wrote more than one Erie Times-News column comparing how corrupt state governments remain in Pennsylvania and Illinois. I never could really decide whether pols representing us in Harrisburg were worse than the pols that represented me in Springfield years ago. You could flip a coin and not be wrong.

The clinching argument comes back to this shameful reality: The last two Illinois governors are going to spend time in jail. Republican George Ryan is already there for assorted abuses and crimes; Democrat Rod Blagojevich, who was impeached last year for placing President Obama’s Senate seat appointment up for the highest bid, goes on trial in June. He is going to jail.

In the March 27 New York Times, the paper’s former editorial page editor Gail Collins examines the Land of Lincoln’s corrupt ways (Nothing Is Easy in Illinois).

A taste:

But about the lieutenant governor.

I have always been particularly interested in this office since I nurture a secret ambition to become a lieutenant governor one day myself. I am really pretty well qualified since I am extremely good at waiting around for something to happen.

Gov. David Paterson of New York, a former lieutenant governor who moved up after another scandal-resignation, is now engulfed in all sorts of scandals himself. If he decided to resign, it might open up a window to my long-cherished dream, while also allowing my state to finally beat Illinois in the race for the most dreadful political culture in the country.

However, Illinois has not been standing still. It held the primary for state offices at the beginning of February, which is not a time when people are in the optimal mood to go to the polls. The Republicans wound up with a gubernatorial candidate who once called the minimum wage “government intrusion.” For the Senate, Democrats got the son of a Chicago banking family whose bank seems about to fail.

Then there was the No. 2 slot. In Illinois, the candidates for lieutenant governor run all by themselves in the primary. Then the winner is yoked to the gubernatorial nominee on the ticket in November. Would-be lieutenant governors tend not to be household names, so the results of these primaries can be peculiar. (In 1986, Democratic voters nominated a 28-year-old follower of the extremely strange Lyndon LaRouche. This happened on a night that the Chicago LaRouchians were busy holding a mock exorcism in front of the home of a religion professor they had decided was a warlock. The gubernatorial nominee, Adlai Stevenson III, was so horrified that he bolted the ticket and ran as a third-party candidate. Everybody lost.)

This year, on the Republican side, the lieutenant governor winner was one Jason Plummer, a 27-year-old heir to a lumber fortune. He had virtually no prior political experience but stressed his leadership training as an intelligence officer in the Navy Reserves. Postelection scrutiny showed that Plummer had received his commission three days after announcing his candidacy last September.

Democratic voters, meanwhile, picked Scott Lee Cohen, who turned out to be a pawnbroker with a former steroids abuse problem whose ex-wife charged him with failure to pay child support and whose ex-girlfriend once claimed he threatened her by holding a knife to her neck.

On the plus-side, the results inspired the Legislature to move the primary to March.

What In the Hell Are These Guys Drinking?

I have to share this from Steve Benen’s Washington Monthly Political Animal department (www.washingtonmonthly.com). I’m not making this stuff up:

QUOTE OF THE DAY…. Most of the far-right arguments against health care reform are either wrong, stale, or both. What we really need is some new far-right arguments to help keep things interesting. Oh, here’s one now.

On Glenn Beck’s radio show this morning, guest-host Doc Thompson explained his belief that he, as a white person, is a victim of racism inherent in the new Affordable Care Act. You read that right.

Alex Seitz-Wald, thankfully, transcribed the relevant portion. “For years I’ve suggested that racism was in decline and yeah, there are some, you know, incidents that still happen with regards to racism, but most of the claims I’ve said for years, well, they’re not really real,” Thompson told listeners. “But I realize now that I was wrong. For I now too feel the pain of racism. Racism has been dropped at my front door and the front door of all lighter-skinned Americans.

“The health care bill the president just signed into law includes a 10 percent tax on all indoor tanning sessions starting July 1st, and I say, who uses tanning? Is it dark-skinned people? I don’t think so. I would guess that most tanning sessions are from light-skinned Americans. Why would the President of the United States of America — a man who says he understands racism, a man who has been confronted with racism — why would he sign such a racist law? Why would he agree to do that? Well now I feel the pain of racism.”

Sure you do, Doc. Sure you do.

Sadly, I think Doc Thompson believes this racist nonsense.