LIKE MCARTHUR, I HAVE RETURNED — only without the staged photo-op. Regular blogging will resume later, but I want to thank my guestbloggers for doing such a great job in my absence. Scrolling down, I’m very impressed by what I see. I’ve asked them to continue to drop in occasionally between now and the election — there’s too much going on for me to fly solo, here.

One of my travel-reading books this week was Eric Flint’s The Grantville Gazette, a book of stories in Flint’s alternate-history world that were written by fans; many are quite good. Flint’s introduction explains how he built that world as a collaborative exercise via his publisher’s website, and the whole process sounds a bit, well, bloggy. The result is certainly good. Once again, the line between readers and writers is blurring. And that’s a good thing.

Meanwhile, over at her own blog, Megan McArdle issues her long-awaited Presidential endorsement. “Kerry’s record for the first fifteen years in the senate, before he knew what he needed to say in order to get elected, is not the record of anyone I want within spitting distance of the White House war room. . . . For all the administration’s screw -ups — and there have been many — I’m sticking with the devil I know. George Bush in 2004.”