Bluegrass Report 2.0 off to unimpressive start

After months of inactivity, Bluegrass Report came back on the scene earlier this month. While founder Mark Nickolas is still no longer a Kentucky resident, he promised a commonwealth blogger would take the reins and continue that blog's tradition.

(A tradition of libel and slander, hyping falsehoods and twisting the truth? That's a tradition we'd rather not have, but to each their own).

So far, we've been unimpressed with this newest incarnation of the Democrat blog that purports (untruthfully, of course) to be An Unfiltered and Candid Look at Politics, Politicians and the Media in Kentucky but in reality spins like an out-of-control carousel.

The name of the new blogger is unimportant. He's someone we'd never heard of, anyway, so he can't be too terribly influential. But what he's posting is uninspiring.

To date, his contributions include whining about the lack of progress on Interstate 69 in western Kentucky (he must be living on a rock because Kentucky is one of the leaders in pushing this highway forward), an absolutely ludicrous rant about how the media hates Steve Beshear and is treating him unfairly (tell that to Ernie Fletcher, who really was given a raw deal by the press), and two "so-what" posts claiming that Senate President David Williams (gasp) has taken contributions from highway contractors and may actually know or be related to some of them.

Horror of horrors! The world is ending! The glaciers are melting and we're all going to drown in a global-warming-induced flood!

The Williams "expose" is hardly news. It really isn't even worth mentioning. It isn't scandal, or even noteworthy. Yet some Democrats are ranting and raving that the mainstream press is doing the state a disservice by ignoring this blockbuster story.

We've got news for you folks -- the mainstream press has missed stories a lot bigger than this. So far, we haven't seen one peep about the conflicts of interest inherent in the special grand jury that indicted Fletcher and members of his administration, and this is a story that strips away any validity or integrity of those indictments.

One post in reply to this earth-shattering "scoop" hinted that Williams had demanded that Bluegrass Report take the original story down. We can only hope this is true. One of our collective wet dreams has been for Bluegrass Report to be slapped with a libel suit that would shut down the site and financially ruin its owners. We blame that Web site for coarsening the level of political discourse in Kentucky and dragging it into the gutter. BGR made it trendy to substitute partisan rants and profanity for honest analysis of current events and political happenings; a relay torch that a bunch of other liberal Kentucky blogs have picked up and run with.

Not that BGR was ever anything to live up to or aspire -- we value the truth and integrity too much to ever regard that "slander blog" (as some have called it) as anything to emulate -- but the new incarnation has a long way to go before it will be relevant.

We know what sort of disgusting being Mark Nickolas is. The new blogger at BGR might want to consider disassociating himself with Nickolas and his blog lest the stench permeate him as well.