Just back from two weeks’ media cold turkey and, as in past years, you will have to endure an element of my getting back into the swing of things, catching up with developments I missed, and making observations that will probably already seem to you readers to be the obvious. To start with — the big fat bullseye painted on Howard Dean’s back, now he has solidified his frontrunner position, has emerged in earnest while I was gone, with barbed arrows headed in his direction as suggested in this prescient post from Atrios .