Posted: February 13, 2013 at 6:39 pm
Electric City Weblog Will Be Missed
by Cowgirl
This week, the Great Falls blog Electric City Weblog announced it is shutting down. And while I won’t miss Rob Natelson’s posts, Gregg Smith was a good writer and an engaged blogger who covered local Great Falls civic issues no one else was covering.
Perhaps most notably, Smith was the only news source I know of that covered the Great Falls City Commission’s scandalous treatment of a local woman who stood up for homeless pets from the very beginning.
Readers of ECWL will recall the story of Ms. Susan Overfield.
The city of Great Falls ended up paying a cool half million dollar settlement to Ms. Overfield who, a judge ruled, was assaulted, beaten, falsely imprisoned–and deprived of all her Constitutional rights to liberty, speech, and participation in government–all because she made some comments that were critical of the city over what she saw as shady handling of an animal shelter contract.
There was quite a bit more to the story than what you could find in the papers, and Electric City Weblog was there at every turn. You don’t have to be of the same political persuasion as Smith to appreciate this as good reporting.
Good riddance. Smith cultivated a handy group of yes men for his site by deleting or editing comments he didn’t agree with. He even admitted it. I for one am happy to see him go and I hope the door hits him in the ass on the way out.
All true. I know. I was there, not during the incident itself, but for all the fallout. And it’s probably a very, very good thing that I wasn’t there the night brutality took place, for it could have turned ugly real quick. I know Susan well. She is the girlfriend of my friend, Ric Valios, founder of the Rangers, who was there that evening and intervened on her behalf.
And Gregg Smith is a hero in my book. Gregg is old school hero, the kind that says to hell with the consequences and does what’s right regardless. Your post pretty much says it all. Sure, Gregg is probably a republican, but he is also a man of impeccable integrity, and he is also extremely intelligent. (PhD I believe) He did what no one else was willing to do in GF. He DID fight city hall when everyone else turned tail and ran or was complicit. Gregg loves his community enough to put it all on the line to make it a better place. Gregg saw his duty clearly and did it. I will miss his blog.
Honorable mention must also go to Mary Jolley, another of those “hated” republicans who DID actually witness the brutality, and was not in the least hesitant to speak out. Mary also followed the case closely in all its machinations. I sat by Mary through the entirety of Susan’s sham trial.
Marry went on to win a seat on the city council, where she performed admirably. And now, she’s won a seat as a justice of the peace. Mary is another one of my heroes.
We in GF are blessed to have Republicans such as Gregg Smith and Mary Jolley.
I’m proud to say that I know both Gregg and Mary.
I can’t be the only one who finds it hilarious that someone would air consequence free personal grievance under the name “Anonymous”.
Frankly, I didn’t mind Professor Bob all that much, at least as not as much as Kavulla. Travis was smart enough to spin any appeal into the dumbest zone possible. But then, instant karma is an unforgiving bitch. He now has to deal with the lie monkey, Roger Koopman. ~heh~
I’m not going to miss Prof. Natelson’s arguments all that much, because he really wasn’t that good at making them in the blogging format. I still swear the man spends his nights holding seance to converse with the “FOUNDING FATHERS”, most of whom would be driven insane coping with this ‘world of tomorrow!’. But he brought some extremely relevant and interesting topics to the table from a constitutional and legal viewpoint. That I will miss very very much. If Natelson had one failing in the weblog format, it’s that he didn’t seem to understand that the Internet is everywhere and everything. He wrote at ECW for a narrow audience in his head that didn’t exist in reality. The best was that he treated every issue, trivial or not, as seriously as one could hope. All issues to him were American issues. As easy as it was to reduce his posts to partisan politics, they never had that odor. He wanted and strived to argue substance. I’m gonna miss that.
Much has been written about Gregg’s great work; so much that I can’t add anything here. I hope to once again in my life lift a beer with him on the banks of the big river. This guy is really good folk. I can’t write more on that without depression setting in.
Dave Budge I will likely miss the most at ECW. Every blogger who engages for a while adds spice to the online. Dave brings Cayenne Pepper, and uses it liberally. He understands the venue, punches back when punched and isn’t afraid to throw a bomb or two, or forty, himself.
Many of ECW’s commenters, I will not miss. Not the guy who called for ‘liberal filth’ to be eradicated. Not the guy who thinks Constitutional challenges have to clear Teapeep muster before the courts. Still, the Montana online grows more silent, and this is not a good thing.
You’re probably not the only one who finds it hilarious because you’re probably not the only one that makes that completely unsupported leap in logic that because I noticed Smith’s editing and deleting of posts those posts must have been mine. They weren’t but thanks for playing.
Speaking of ‘leaps in logic’, perhaps you skipped the part where words actually mean things. I never wrote or even implied that yours were the comments Gregg deleted or edited. However, you were butthurt enough about the way he administered *his* website to wish him “Good riddance” and a smack in the ass. That would be precisely the “personal grievance” I was referring to. I still find it hilarious that you would have to come here, presumably a safe place, to bitch about another website you didn’t like and do so anonymously.