Where Is Andrew Sullivan?

Andrew writes the blog The Daily Dish for Atlantic magazine and operates one of the longest running continuous sites in the blogosphere; I find his political analysis indispensable and try to read his site on a daily basis. He is a truly prolific blogger, usually posting between 30-50 times a day and even has guest bloggers come in to cover for him when he's away but the only thing he's put up in the last 24 hours is this picture of flowers which I suspect is an automated posting.

Andrew is HIV positive so I hope that there have been no complications on that front. If I sound like I'm harping on this it's just because I really like his stuff, plus he once linked to this post on my blog giving this site it's largest single day of hits by more than an order of magnitude. Speak up, Andrew.

[Update: Less than ten minutes after this post went up Andrew surfaced on his blog; all is well, vote Obama, yadda yadda yadda.]

[Update II: There are now rumors floating around the blogosphere that Andrew has been either fired from The Atlantic or at least told to stand down for a few days. All that has followed his quick assurance that nothing is wrong have been a few simple posts; this Desperate Housewives clip in which a child is forced by his mother to apologize for some wrongdoing and this cryptic quote:

Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muß man schweigen

According to Wikipedia, this translates to “whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.” He's taken a lot of heat lately for his words about Sarah Palin and his opinion that she is woefully unqualified for the nomination and that John McCain's decision to tap her for the position is one of immense irresponsibility, while also extolling the blogosphere and mainstream media to further pursue their investigations into who Palin is and what her election could mean for the country despite the grumblings coming from the McCain campaign.

Perhaps someone with more than a little economic/political clout decided to lean on the higher ups at The Atlantic. I've also read from anonymous commenters that it's possible that because of this Andrew has refused to post to his blog and that The Atlantic staff is meeting about it as I write this. All anyone can say for certain at this point is that this is extremely out of character for the man while smelling more than a little fishy; anyone who reads his blog on any kind of regular basis knows that he would never just take a few days off during one of the most interesting periods of a presidential election without a very compelling reason. Hopefully we'll know the truth soon enough; I need my fix.]

[Update III: Just one last addition for the sake of full coverage; Sullivan is back blogging like a marathoner with nary a further mention of the offline drama. His criticism of the McCain campaign and their continuing tactic of keeping Sarah Palin away from the press, along with this whole lipstick on a pig bullshit, is as veritable and biting as ever, which makes me think that if there was an intellectual/ideological struggle with his editors he stuck to his guns and won out; but really, what do I know about it? He's not talking and I'm still reading. And sorry if this was all a little too melodramatic, I was just having fun getting caught up in a "blogger soap opera" as one L bill commented.]