I posted this post to the general support forum which I did not get an answer to.

I did some more digging and found a simple answer.  My hosting service blocks pings to external servers.  My pings don't return an error because they are blocked and sent into oblivion.

If you plan on pinging Weblogs.com (or blo.gs in MT 2.5) the first thing you should do when setting up your hosting is to ask if they block pings.

I believe this should be added to the manual, and it would be really nice if it was remotely possible for mt-check.cgi or some other script could check to see if pinging worked properly on the host system.  It would probably stop a lot of unnecessary questions on these forums. I've seen a lot of unanswered questions regarding pings when I did my research on this issue initially.