What do you do if your candidate for UN ambassador us too extreme to get confirmed by the Senate? If you’re George W. Bush, you wait until Senate is no longer in session, and you appoint your candidate in their absence. Evidently the Senate’s role is no longer “advise and consent”, but simply “rubber stamp or be overriden”. To be fair though, this move causes some outrage but no surprise — I predicted it myself on Metafilter a few weeks ago, as did a few others.