The Messenger-Post has a story about area blogs and the Kuhl "packing" comment. Tom Tucker from Rochesterturning and I are quoted.
My first quote is this:
“It was some off-hand dumb comment ... and he’s not a dumb man and he doesn’t do dumb things ... but giving all this emphasis isn’t very healthy,” Rottenchester said. “It’s like gossip.”
Space limitations made Bryan condense a few thoughts into one quote. My larger point on "gossip" was that people are drawn to these controversies for the same reason we read gossip: we're endlessly fascinated when someone slips up in public. The unhealthy aspect is that concentrating on these controversies occupies the (limited) bandwidth people have for politics.
That's not a criticism of Bryan's reporting, by the way: it's always hard to condense down a long interview into a short news story, especially when dealing with someone as verbose as me. He was faced with the challenge of mining 25 minutes of conversation for a couple of quotes.