Countdown w/o Olbermann has the video of Bolton being booed as he enters the UN. Also the segment includes reactions from Obama, Dodd, Voinovich and Kofi.

Download | play -WMP

From our UK friends, The Guardian's headline reads: "Bush bypasses Senate to install neo-con at UN"
Yellow Dog digs up this piece on Richard Holbooke's nomination. "Richard Holbrooke, who Republicans delayed for 14 months as Bill Clinton's nominee to the U.N., refused to bypass the Senate with a recess appointment, saying that it would introduce him to the world body with no credibility or authority."

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Liberal Oasis alerted me and wrote about this, while Arlen/Media Matters sent the video: Saturday-The Chris Matthews Show

CHRIS MATTHEWS: But they [people in the White House] saw him, Bob, as the enemy, didn’t they? In all fairness, didn’t they see him as the enemy, Joe Wilson?

Download | play -QT

WOODWARD: "These words get thrown around, the effort to trash Joe Wilson, a campaign... to discredit him. And there were reasonable grounds to discredit Wilson... he said something that in his reports a year before, that contradicted what he wrote in an op-ed in the New York Times."

There are a lot of reasons to support Hackett; if elected, he'd be the first Iraq war veteran to serve in Congress. That means he doesn't need to go on "fact-finding" missions to Iraq because he's already been there. (For more on Paul's experiences there, visit here). Electing Hackett also means a Democratic voice in Congress, not a rubber-stamp for President Bush.

Here's the link for the audio

On Stern's show today he played audio clips of Limbaugh railing on drug users in the past.

Audio

I wonder how he feels now!

I figured it's a good time to bring back his rant at the UN.

Download | play -WMP

Download | play -QT-different version of the same thing

Brigham explains the situation. You can donate here.

Atrios has a funding update.

Hackett on CBS Evening News -Jean Schmidt says Hackett isn't pro-family.

Video-WMP

The Raw Story is reporting another scandal in Ohio.

Hackett has a diary up on Daily Kos

What a fool. When the first question most people ask is why isn't he in a jail cell, I think his credibility is pretty shot. I thought he wasn't going to comment on the story again. Here's his latest column. "What he did say was, as I reported in a previous column, "she probably never again would be given a foreign assignment but that exposure of her name might cause 'difficulties.'

Larry Johnson replies in No Quarter: ... He admits that he was told revealing Plame's identity would cause "difficulties". CIA spokesmen where in the position of having to protect a sensitive, covert asset and this joke of a journalist did not appreciate that creating difficulties for an intelligence agency in a time of war is a bad thing?...read on

AmericaBlog says" He outs an undercover agent....once again doing the dirty work for Karl Rove and Bush, and somehow he's the victim".

The Booman Trubune has a lenghty diary on Novie and Johnson. No-Yak Novak Yammers; Larry Johnson Replies

Talk Left writes: Novak Breaks His Silence : Note that he says Plame's identity "could be" found in Who's Who. He doesn't say that's where he got it. He acknowledges asking Harlow about her. But from whom did he hear it in the first place? Will Novak's vanity in writing this piece come back to bite him? ...read on

President Bush sidestepped the Senate and installed embattled nominee John Bolton as ambassador to the United Nations on Monday, ending a five-month impasse with Democrats who accused Bolton of abusing subordinates and twisting intelligence to fit his conservative ideology. "This post is too important to leave vacant any longer, especially during a war and a vital debate about UN reform," Bush said....read on

This was a fairly obvious move by the President. If anybody thinks that Bush will ever care what the Senators, House, or the American people think are sadly mistaken. If he could recess appoint his Social Security plan he would. ( lol ) Cole thinks it doesnt matter either way.

I wonder given today's advancements with the internet(s) and 24/7 if Bolton's appointment now makes him look like a bigger lame duck than normal. The amount of coverage his nomination received was viewed world wide with endless discussions for and against him and I wonder if this sends a terrible message to the world. We have a democratic process, if it stalls the President acts like a King and makes the appointment anyway. Not that it hasn't been done in the past, but the visibility of it so much much higher now.

Arthur has more: PEOPLE JUST DON’T GET IT: Most people seem not to understand that when we deal with the Bush administration, we are dealing with something unique, and uniquely dangerous: an administration which is fully committed to an ideology—an ideology that is entirely self-contained and completely self-referencing. It is not concerned with facts, evidence, logic and argument. It is concerned only with its own internal vision of the world, and how that world should be constructed and how it should operate.

John Cole finds this nugget from Charles:

"Religion is back out of the closet. But nothing could do more to undermine this most salutary restoration than the new and gratuitous attempts to invade science, and most particularly evolution, with religion...... Faith can and should be proclaimed from every mountaintop and city square. But it has no place in science class. To impose it on the teaching of evolution is not just to invite ridicule but to earn it....read on

It can't get much worse for "God's Own Circus" when a chief White House apologist takes the high road on this issue. ( Well...maybe it can. One can only hope.)

(code updated after move to WP)