The dinner is now sold out, but general admission tickets remain, for a modest $12.80. We will be talking about the political situation in Minnesota–hence, “Taking Back the Tundra”–and immigration, but, with Obama scandals dominating the news, there will be lots more to discuss. Hope to see you there!

Since last Sunday, May 19, rioters have taken to the streets of Stockholm’s suburbs every night, torching cars, schools, stores, office buildings and residential complexes. Yesterday, a police station in Rågsved, a suburb four kilometers south of Stockholm, was attacked and set on fire.

But while the Stockholm riots keep spreading and intensifying, Swedish police have adopted a tactic of non-interference. ”Our ambition is really to do as little as possible,” Stockholm Chief of Police Mats Löfving explained to the Swedish newspaper Expressen on Tuesday.

”We go to the crime scenes, but when we get there we stand and wait,” elaborated Lars Byström, the media relations officer of the Stockholm Police Department. ”If we see a burning car, we let it burn if there is no risk of the fire spreading to other cars or buildings nearby. By doing so we minimize the risk of having rocks thrown at us.”

Well, that’s one way of looking at it. I noted last night that in Great Britain, police are powerless to deal with Islamic terrorists who attack innocent citizens with knives and meat cleavers (partly, at least, because most of them are unarmed), but a serious crackdown on those who criticize Muslim terrorists on Twitter or Facebook is in progress.

Something similar is happening in Sweden, as Joe Malchow points out. The police don’t do anything to prevent cars from being torched by “youths”–here’s a hint, the “youths” aren’t named Erik or Gustav–but parking regulations are being strictly enforced. So we have this absurd situation:

Swedish parking laws, however, continue to be rigidly enforced despite the increasingly chaotic situation. Early Wednesday, while documenting the destruction after a night of rioting in the Stockholm suburb of Alby, a reporter from Fria Tider observed a parking enforcement officer writing a ticket for a burnt-out Ford.

When questioned, the officer explained that the ticket was issued because the vehicle lacked a tag showing its time of arrival. The fact that the vehicle had been effectively destroyed – its windshield smashed and the interior heavily damaged by fire – was irrelevant according to the meter maid, who asked Fria Tider’s photographer to destroy the photos he had taken.

This, I take it, is one of those photos:

That’s the thing about Sweden: just when you think there is not a single good thing about the country, you are forced to admit that they have the world’s most fetching meter maids. Still, that doesn’t prevent the decline of civilization from proceeding apace in Sweden, as in Great Britain.

According to the Daily Caller, the record shows that Rubio used his power as Speaker to block legislation to tighten enforcement even after such legislation had saied through committee. He even opposed, and thwarted, bipartisan legislation to deport 5,000 illegal immigrant prisoners in Florida jails.

Rubio’s Florida record helps us understand his indifferent attitude towards enforcement in connection with the Schumer-Rubio amnesty bill. As we have noted, Rubio’s position on enforcement is, in essence: maybe there are problems with what I hve proposed, but others can fix them.

I think it’s pretty clear that Rubio isn’t backing amnesty and a path to citizenship reluctantly, as the only way we can attain better enforcement. Instead, amnesty and a path to citizenship are his objectives, with the promise of better enforcement just along for the ride.

The hard-line Rubio took on immigratiion when he ran for the Senate is an outlier in Rubio’s history on the subject. That’s a polite way of saying that this position was, in all likelihood, fraudulent — a cynical attempt tp appeal to conservatives in his long-shot race against Charlie Crist.

But come on man, you’re only just discovering now that the federal administrative bureaucracy—the “fourth branch of government”—has become problematic?  From Turley’s article today in the Washington Post:

The growing dominance of the federal government over the states has obscured more fundamental changes within the federal government itself: It is not just bigger, it is dangerously off kilter. Our carefully constructed system of checks and balances is being negated by the rise of a fourth branch, an administrative state of sprawling departments and agencies that govern with increasing autonomy and decreasing transparency. . .

This exponential growth has led to increasing power and independence for agencies. The shift of authority has been staggering. The fourth branch now has a larger practical impact on the lives of citizens than all the other branches combined.

The rise of the fourth branch has been at the expense of Congress’s lawmaking authority. In fact, the vast majority of “laws” governing the United States are not passed by Congress but are issued as regulations, crafted largely by thousands of unnamed, unreachable bureaucrats. One study found that in 2007, Congress enacted 138 public laws, while federal agencies finalized 2,926 rules, including 61 major regulations.

This rulemaking comes with little accountability. It’s often impossible to know, absent a major scandal, whom to blame for rules that are abusive or nonsensical. Of course, agencies owe their creation and underlying legal authority to Congress, and Congress holds the purse strings. But Capitol Hill’s relatively small staff is incapable of exerting oversight on more than a small percentage of agency actions. And the threat of cutting funds is a blunt instrument to control a massive administrative state — like running a locomotive with an on/off switch.

From here Turley goes of the rails a bit, but failing to understand that Congress actually wants it this way.

But more to the point, it never ceases to amaze me when “mainstream” potentates like Turley come to understand what conservatives have been saying loudly for thirty or forty years, but somehow pose as though they’ve discovered something new or are offering brilliant new insights.