The time has come to make official what has been unofficial for several months now; the Green Mountain Daily doors are officially closed up.

Over the years – all the way to my 38th birthday to the day – the site evolved from a quiet opinion site, to full-on gossip column for the Statehouse, to a player on the political stage. We held the first online, statewide politcal debate between John Tracy and Matt Dunne for Lt. Governor (and it was a TEXT debate no less!), put the kibosh on a quiet, illegal intrusion by the state police into Vermonters’ medical records, became a serious player in Democratic primaries, brought down a “cute” statewide movement based and built on racism (before it was cool to bring down cute statewide movements based and built on racism) and sooOOoooOOOoo much more. We gleefully bucked conventional wisdom – and yeah, made a few mistakes when we were led astray by sources (and to you who did, well played indeed. My hat goes off). And we had fun while doing it (oh, those April Fool’s Day and Halloween posts).

We haven’t been without our internal battles too, which seems an inevitability when you put a lot of very different, passionate, and opinionated (but always the most decent of human beings) into such a blind mix.

And we lost one of our own as well. Julie Waters became such a force in the site with her intellect, compassion, incisiveness, crazy-awesome-wit, and enthusiasm. Her loss still stings, and will never stop stinging. Nor should it.

I could go on forever, but I won’t because I’ll get all verklempt. Thanks to Jack, and Bill and Sue for carrying on the torch after I left, and I’ll be leaving the site up as an archive (at least what we have and what wasn’t lost in the conversion from the old soapblox system at the height of the political blog era).

So to friends, foes, readers, avoid-at-all-costers, members of the press, everybody who got together to buy me a laptop in 2008 (still wowed by that one), and…well… whoever, I guess – I say goodbye, farewell, and amen (because I have never been anything without my pop culture references for old people).

And as for our contributors – especially the long list of front pagers over the years… you rock.

Yer pal,

John (odum)