John Bolton's long-stalled nomination to be UN ambassador will apparently have to wait a little longer. News from Capitol Hill this afternoon is that liberal Sen. Lincoln Chafee (R.-R.I.) is refusing to let Bolton be favorably discharged from the Foreign Relations Committee, meaning it's highly unlikely Bolton will get a vote on the Senate floor before recess.

Sen. Richard Lugar, chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, said the Senate likely will recess later this week without voting on him. Lugar, R-Ind., said in an interview with The Associated Press that no meeting had been scheduled to take up the controversial nominee.

The Senate is expected to return after the congressional elections in November. Bolton has been serving as the U.S. ambassador to the U.N. under a recess appointment that is due to expire at the end of the year.

Lugar said that if one Democratic senator were to step forward and support Bolton, he might be able to set a committee vote before the recess. In the meantime, Lugar added, Sen. Lincoln Chafee, a Rhode Island Republican, is holding up the nomination with questions about the Bush administration's Middle East policy.

Of course, earlier this month, I was the optimist who reported, based on conversations with my sources at the time, that Chafee would drop his silent filibuster of Bolton after he won the Republican primary. However, that appears to be untrue.

Fresh off his primary victory -- thanks to an influx of cash from national Republicans -- Chafee is behaving exactly as conservatives warned he would. Unfortunately, there's little recourse but to badger current Senate leadership (as blogger Jon Fleishman courageously did to Sen. Rick Santorum this week). It's even more proof that Sen. Elizabeth Dole (R.-N.C.) made a colossal blunder when the National Republican Senatorial Committee attacked Chafee's conservative challenger in the primary.

Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R.-Tenn.) launched a website, BloggingForBolton.com, earlier this month that we applauded. The problem with Frist's idea is that it takes Democrats to task for blocking Bolton. Add Chafee to that list and Frist may get somewhere.