Casino czar Sheldon Adelson is the sixteenth wealthiest person in the world, with a net worth of $21.5 billion. He also lavishes much of his wealth on far right Republican candidates. In the current election cycle, Adelson and his wife have already spent $10 million to buy the White House for Newt Gingrich.

Adelson, however, is also an orthodox Jew, and this fact inspired his home state to provide a special polling place that will allow voters who observe a Saturday Sabbath to participate in next Saturday’s GOP caucus:

A special non-Sabbath voting session for observant Jews and Seventh Day Adventists in the GOP primaries will be held Saturday evening at an educational center built by Sheldon Adelson, who backs Newt Gingrich, and challengers are upset.

The voting is scheduled for the Sabbath, but Adelson, a casino magnate who made billions in Las Vegas and elsewhere, voiced his concern that Jews observing the Sabbath – and who presumably back Gingrich – would not be able to vote. Seventh Day Adventists also observe the Sabbath on Saturday

The word spread quickly that Adelson was upset, and the state decided to allow a special polling station after the Sabbath ends on Saturday.

Much about this arrangement is shady — including the fact that this special caucus is being held at a center owned by Adelson — but there should be no doubt about one thing: Sheldon Adelson is an American citizen and he has the same right to vote that any other American enjoys. Nevada did exactly the right thing by ensuring that Adelson will not have to choose between exercising his most fundamental right or obeying the tenets of his faith.

The same cannot be said, however, for the hundreds of GOP lawmakers who have spent the last few years devising more and more creative ways to make it harder for people who do not own billions of dollars worth of casino investments to vote. It is wrong to deny reasonable accommodations to religious voters, but it is no less wrong to enact Voter ID laws that target minorities, students and low-income voters for disenfranchisement. Or to prevent voters from registering. Or to enact laws that restrict early voting and thus make it harder for people who cannot get off work on election day to vote.

America cannot have one set of rules for billionaires and another for everyone else. All Americans deserve the same access to the polls that Sheldon Adelson enjoys.

Earlier this month, South Carolina Attorney General Alan Wilson (R) set off alarms by claiming there was evidence that over 900 dead people had voted in his state’s recent elections. The charge has since been echoed in a wide array of media outlets, nowhere more prominently than Fox News.

Although the state has not disclosed the names of the 900 zombies who allegedly showed up at the polls, Wilson did provide six names which he claims are on the list. Yet a preliminary review of these six by the South Carolina State Election Commission reveals six far more innocent explanations (bolds are ours):

• One was an absentee ballot cast by a voter who then died before election day;
• Another was the result of an error by a poll worker who mistakenly marked the voter as Samuel Ferguson, Jr. when the voter was in fact Samuel Ferguson, III;
• Two were the result of stray marks on the voter registration list detected by the scanner – again, a clerical error;
• The final two were the result of poll managers incorrectly marking the name of the voter in question instead of the voter listed either above or below on the list.

When ThinkProgress wrote about Wilson’s charge two and a half weeks ago, we noted that nearly every time someone makes dead voter allegations, the culprit ends up being “a spelling error, a check-in error, or simply a death shortly after Election Day.” Indeed, clerical errors and a death close to Election Day is precisely what happened in Abbeville County, not voting from the grave.

Though Fox News ran multiple segments hyping the allegations that dead people had tainted South Carolina’s elections, a preliminary review shows that the cable station has yet to report on the State Election Commission’s review debunking Wilson’s charge.

In many ways, this is the major problem: “dead voter” claims are sexy, getting reported far and wide nearly every election. Yet when the allegations are inevitably shown to be false, far fewer news outlets follow up. As a result, many people never learn that dead voters didn’t taint South Carolina’s recent elections.

Every few years, officials undertake the same Scooby Doo-routine, claiming to have uncovered damning evidence of dead voters, only to ultimately conclude that simpler explanations account for the inconsistencies. Just like Maryland and California in 1994, Georgia in 1998, or New Hampshire in 2004, South Carolina is the latest state to put on the “dead voter” Kabuki performance.

Jesus Navarro, a dialysis patient who will die without a kidney transplant, has private insurance. He has a donor to provide the needed kidney. But because he is an undocumented immigrant, hospital administrators at UC San Francisco Medical Center are refusing to allow the procedure, saying that there is no guarantee Navarro will receive the necessary follow-up care because of his immigration status. Now, Navarro is stuck in an “ethical gray area” for the hospital. “It puts the doctors in a very awkward and torn position,” said Arthur Caplan, a bioethics professor at the University of Pennsylvania. “You come into this trying to do good and find yourself stuck in the middle of a fight about immigration.”

For eight years, Navarro has used a home dialysis machine to cleanse his blood after his kidneys began to fail. He reached the top of the waitlist for a kidney in the spring, but doctors called off his transplant when they discovered his immigration status. Even after his wife offered her kidney for the transplant, administrators still refused to allow the surgery. Reece Fawley, executive director of transplantation at UC San Francisco, said in a statement that the hospital considers socioeconomic stability for all patients, including immigration status.

Navarro’s situation highlights a dilemma for hospitals when it comes to organ transplants for immigrants, especially if their undocumented status threatens their continued access to insurance:

Though no data are available, anecdotal evidence suggests clinics sometimes perform organ transplants on illegal immigrants, especially when the patients are young. In one high-profile case, UCLA Medical Center gave an undocumented woman three liver transplants before she turned 21.

But health administrators also reject patients because of their immigration status, though that usually happens when the patients lack insurance. Bellevue Hospital in New York attracted attention last year when it refused to transplant a kidney between brothers because they could not pay for the operation. [...]

Some bioethicists say the hospital should have performed the surgery because Navarro would not be taking resources away from other patients or putting his wife at serious risk.

After all, many legal residents fail to follow their post-surgical plan.

Some lawmakers would even want hospitals to check the immigration status for all patients. The Arizona legislature considered a bill that would require that, and Rep. Steve King (R-IA) said in November that it would not be going “too far” to have hospitals ask patients about their immigration status.

But in the meantime, Navarro’s private insurance from his job would cover the transplant and follow-up care, but he lost job last month after an immigration audit and his insurance could run out. If he is unable to extend his insurance and ends up in California’s Medi-Cal program, his problem would worsen because Medi-Cal would not cover the immunosuppressive drugs that prevent organ rejection after a transplant. “We don’t know what to do,” his wife said. “It’s like we’re on a ledge — we can’t go here or there.”

Eight in 10 Americans believe that there is too much money in American politics, and only 17 percent agree with the Supreme Court that corporations should be allowed to spend unlimited money to try to influence elections.

Yet top Republicans are coalescing around the idea that current campaign finance laws — which still prohibit corporations and wealthy individuals from giving unlimited money directly to campaigns — are actually too restrictive. Judging from interviews with ThinkProgress and Republican campaign speeches over the past two months, the GOP’s standard response to the Citizens United Supreme Court ruling has solidified: allow for unlimited contributions directly to candidates while requiring immediate disclosure.

The language used by different high-ranking Republicans is so similar that it suggests a certain level of message-coordination on the subject. Indeed, from GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney to former Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty (R) to Republican money man Fred Malek, their reactions to campaign finance laws are virtually identical:

• Former Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty: “The better position is to allow full and free speech in whatever form, but have instant disclosure.” [1/21/12]
• Top Republican Money Figure Fred Malek: “I would favor unlimited contributions to candidates with full disclosure.” [1/27/12]
• Presidential candidate Mitt Romney: “We’d be a lot wiser to say you can give what you’d like to a campaign. They must report it immediately…” [12/21/11]

Although Republican supporters of unlimited money in politics seem to have decided that supporting campaign disclosures is an important part of their messaging strategy, the GOP’s actions betray any suggestion that they actually stand behind transparency. Following Citizens United, Democrats introduced the DISCLOSE Act to bring more transparency to the murky world of campaign finance. It passed the House in 2010 but failed to break a Republican filibuster by a single vote.

In other words, Republicans seem to care a whole lot more about letting corporations and the very rich buy elections than they do about protecting the American people’s ability to know about it.

Versions of an extreme immigration law — written by Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach — has led to fear and an exodus of Latino workers in states like Alabama, Georgia, and Arizona. After watching their crops rot due to a lack of workers in 2011, many farmers are uncertain of what to do in 2012 if they cannot find enough laborers again. Even apple farmers in Washington state were hurt by harmful anti-immigrant laws in other states.

But rather than follow Arizona’s model and run undocumented immigrants out of the state, Kansas Agriculture Secretary Dale Rodman is seeking a waiver from the federal government so that companies can hire undocumented workers.

According to the Topeka Capital-Journal, Rodman’s goal is “to create a legal, straightforward manner of organizing existing immigrant labor.” He has met with the Department of Homeland Security several times about creating a pilot program to connect employers with undocumented workers through a state-organized network. “I need a waiver,” Rodman told the Associated Press. “It would be good for Kansas agriculture.” Now, details are expected to come out this week about a bill that would create Rodman’s idea of a state-managed worker program:

Mike Beam, senior vice president of the Kansas Livestock Association, said the objective was to secure a reliable, regulated labor pool to the state’s businesses. Despite the recession, there are counties in rural Kansas with unemployment rates half the state average. [...]

Sen. Mark Taddiken, a Clifton Republican and chairman of the Senate Agriculture Committee, said the state’s labor force needed to be solid to allow agricultural production to expand.

“They’re having trouble finding people,” Taddiken said. “The agricultural sector is looking for reliability.”

Rodman said he would not promote the bill and instead continue to focus on working with the Department of Homeland Security, which has so far neither approved or rejected the idea. And similar to Kansas’ plan, a lawmaker in New Mexico also proposed a state guest worker program in that state to handle the issue of undocumented workers.

In states across the country, conservative lawmakers have made attempts to restrict voting rights through voter identification laws, limits on same-day registration, and other methods. These laws are frequently justified as necessary to fight voter fraud — despite the fact that a person is more likely to be struck by lightning than to commit in-person voter fraud. With efforts to pass such laws failing in some states and getting blocked by the federal government in others, one official has apparently decided to prove that voter fraud exists by allegedly going out and committing it himself.

A trial began in Indiana today for former Secretary of State Charlie White (R), who, as secretary of state, is supposed to oversee the state’s elections and ensure their integrity. Instead, White allegedly committed several acts of voter fraud, leading the state to charge with him with seven felonies, Fox News reports:

White was indicted in March, accused of fraud, perjury, theft, voting in the wrong precinct, submitting a false voter registration change of address and casting a “false, fictitious or fraudulent ballot.”

“Charlie White registered to vote at a place he didn’t live. That was in contravention of the law,” said Karen Celestino-Horseman, a lawyer for the Indiana State Democratic Party, which brought the allegations against White at the Indiana Recount Commission. “It was not his residence.”

According to the state, White allegedly was registered and voted in the wrong district while falsely claiming his ex-wife’s residence as his own, and served on the city council while representing a district in which he did not live. White has maintained his innocence on all charges.

White’s voter fraud likely wouldn’t have been prevented by the state’s voter ID law, and his trial could soon be followed by another in New Hampshire, where activists working for conservative videographer James O’Keefe may have knowingly committed voter fraud, potentially in violation of state law, while attempting to prove how easy it was to obtain a ballot with a false name. Multiple state officials have called on authorities to “arrest and prosecute” the activists.

Former Solicitor General Paul Clement is the high-priced lawyer of choice for conservative lawmakers eager to mangle the law and the Constitution at taxpayers’ expense. Clement will defend Arizona’s unconstitutional SB 1070 law before the Supreme Court, he is spearheading the challenge to the Affordable Care Act, and he is charging the American taxpayer $520 an hour to defend the unconstitutional Defense of Marriage Act on behalf of Speaker John Boehner and his fellow House Republicans.

According to a contract released last week, South Carolina taxpayers will now be on the hook for the same price to pay for Clement’s services defending an illegal voter ID law:

South Carolina taxpayers will be on the hook for a high-powered Washington attorney’s $520-an-hour rate when the state sues the federal government this week to protect its voter ID law.

That litigation could cost more than $1 million, according to two South Carolina attorneys who have practiced before the U.S. Supreme Court.

S.C. Attorney General Alan Wilson has more than five dozen staff attorneys to handle the state’s legal affairs, but Wilson hired a former U.S. solicitor general to litigate the voter ID case at a rate of $520 an hour, a contract obtained last week reveals.

South Carolina’s taxpayers aren’t just paying this unnecessary and unnecessarily high fee, they are paying it to defend illegal voter suppression. Voter ID laws are popular among conservative lawmakers because they disproportionately disenfranchise students, low income and minority voters — all of whom tend to be more likely to cast votes for left-of-center candidates than the electorate as a whole. Accordingly, these laws exist for the purpose of shifting the electorate rightward.

Such manipulation of the electorate isn’t just disturbing, it is also illegal because the federal Voting Rights Act prohibits state laws that which are either passed specifically to target minority voters or which have a greater impact on minority voters than on others. If the courts pay even the barest heed to the law, they will strike South Carolina’s voter ID law down in a heartbeat.

When HB 56, Alabama’s harmful immigration law, went into effect in the fall, the most immediate effect were the immigrant families who fled the state. Businesses lost their workers and customers, farmers watched their crops rot without enough workers to harvest them, and parents pulled their children out of school or kept them home from school out of fear.

But supporters of the law thought they had found a silver lining; after only a month, they claimed the immigration law was already causing the state’s unemployment rate to drop. And as the rate has continued to drop a little each month since portions of the law, officials and right-wing media have perpetuated the myth that HB 56 has caused the declining unemployment rate. After three months of declines, the bill’s sponsor, state Sen. Scott Beason finally chimed in last week to celebrate the specious connection:

“Since the anti-illegal immigration law went into effect, Alabama has seen a tremendous drop in unemployment. A drop that far outpaces the other states in the region,” said Alabama State Senator Scott Beason. ”In three months Alabama has dropped 1.7 points to a level below the national average.” [...]

“I promised that the anti-illegal immigration law would open up thousands of jobs for Alabamians, and it has done that. People are going back to work.

“The critics may whine, but many of our neighbors have jobs again. I know those folks are thankful for the opportunity to work and support their families, and that opportunity was opened up by HB-56.”

Beason ignores the fact that even Alabama Gov. Robert Bentley (R), who signed the immigration bill into law, has admitted there is no data to back up the connection. And instead of opening up jobs, businesses have seen jobs lost because of HB 56. At least one jobs recruiter in the state has said the state may actually be driving away foreign companies looking to build new plants because of the immigration law.

Taking a closer look at the numbers shows that, as the unemployment rate dropped from 9.8 percent in September down to 8.1 percent in December, the workforce has also shrunk, rather than adding more jobs. For example, in October 3,578 Alabamians gained jobs, while 6,258 either died, left the state, or stopped looking for employment. And between December 2011 and November 2011, the civilian workforce in Alabama dropped from 2,145,259 people in November to 2,131,994 in December.

Beason and others who raise up Alabama’s immigration law as a job-creating measure are relying on a sleight of hand to hide the true harm behind the measure.

One of the oddest arguments made by the plaintiffs now challenging the Affordable Care Act before the Supreme Court is a claim that, if just one small part of the law is declared unconstitutional, the whole law must fall with it. The overwhelming majority of judges who have heard ACA cases rejected the ridiculous claim that any part of the law is unconstitutional. And, of the handful of judges to strike part of the law down, only one — the guy who included an explicit shout-out to the Tea Party in his opinion — accepted the legally indefensible position that the whole law must fall.

In their attempt to see the entire Affordable Care Act fall, however, several of the plaintiffs challenging the law committed what should be a fatal blunder — they effectively admit that their entire constitutional challenge to the law is garbage.

The primary attack on the ACA targets its provision requiring most Americans to either carry health insurance or pay slightly more income taxes — the so-called “individual mandate.” This insurance coverage provision exists because without it, the law’s other provisions ensuring that people with preexisting conditions can obtain insurance cannot be implemented. If patients can wait until they get sick to buy insurance, they will drain all the money out of an insurance plan that they have not previously paid into, massively driving up costs for the rest of the plan’s consumers.

This problem doesn’t just make the insurance coverage requirement good policy, it also makes it constitutional. The Constitution doesn’t just give Congress sweeping authority to regulate the national economy, it also authorizes it “[t]o make all laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into execution” regulations of interstate commerce. As conservative Justice Antonin Scalia explains, this means that, “where Congress has the authority to enact a regulation of interstate commerce, it possesses every power needed to make that regulation effective.”

So, with this background in mind, consider the following passage from the private plaintiffs’ brief arguing that the entire law must fall if the insurance coverage rule goes down:

The mandate was intended to be a direct subsidy to insurance companies, as compensation for requiring them (in the guaranteed-issue provision) to insure against “risks” that have already come to pass and forbidding them (in the community-rating provision) from using actuarially sound insurance premiums. The mandate thus works to counteract the powerful inflationary impacts of these other provisions, which would otherwise make premiums in the individual insurance market prohibitively expensive, thereby frustrating Congress’ goal of affordable health insurance. And Congress further viewed the mandate as necessary to prevent “adverse selection” to “game” the new insurance rules, which proponents warned would spark a “death spiral” in insurance.

The guaranteed-issue and community-rating requirements thus cannot operate without the mandate in the manner intended by Congress. Rather, “their associated force—not one or the other but both combined—was deemed by Congress to be necessary to achieve the end sought.” To strike the mandate alone would impermissibly eliminate a central quid pro quo of the Act. If the mandate falls, the guaranteed-issue and community-rating regulations must therefore fall with it, as the Government itself has conceded.

So the plaintiffs admit that, without the insurance coverage requirement, premiums will become “prohibitively expensive” and that the ACA’s provisions protecting people with preexisting conditions or who otherwise are highly likely to need health care (what are known as “guaranteed-issue” and “community-rating” laws in the jargon of health policy) “cannot operate without the mandate in the manner intended by Congress.” This is a flat out admission that the Scalia Rule applies in this case. Guaranteed issue and community rating are regulations of interstate commerce, and thus Congress has “every power needed” to make them effective — including the power to enact the insurance coverage requirement.

I discuss this rather breathtaking admission at greater length in an amicus brief I filed Friday on behalf of several health provider organizations, which also includes some more details about why the plaintiffs’ attempt to take out the entire ACA has no basis in law. Ultimately, however, there is no need whatsoever for the justices to consider how much of the law stands or falls without the coverage requirement. The private plaintiffs already gave away the farm when they admitted that their entire legal challenge rests on a crumbling foundation.

MIAMI, Florida — Florida Agriculture Commissioner Adam Putnam (R), who previously served in Congress, condemned the harsh anti-immigration laws passed over the past two years in Georgia, Alabama, Arizona, and elsewhere, calling them “devastating” and “wrong” Friday. At a panel discussion of the Hispanic Leadership Network conference here, Putnam said the laws have “been very harmful to their economy” of the states that passed them, and said it was fortunate Florida didn’t follow in their wake.

Responding to a question about whether states should be able to enforce those laws, Putnam replied:

PUTNAM: Florida flirted with it last year, but thank goodness didn’t do it, because it would have been devastating to our state, to our reputation, to our economy. The issue is that under the Constitution, there’s a really narrow bandwidth of options for states to deal with immigration. … [T]hey’re focusing on the enforcement piece, and have had really devastating effects on their economy. Georgia’s got a labor report out, Alabama’s got a labor report out, that has been very harmful to their economy. Because in swinging wildly out of frustration that Washington hasn’t done something, they’ve passed bills that are causing their businesses and their economies great harm. They’ve seen an evacuation of workers. … It has give us a real world, real time example of what happens when you get these state-based polices wrong.

Watch it:

Last week, Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) announced he would take revenge for President Obama’s decision to make four recess appointments by engaging in a scorched earth campaign of obstruction against the president’s nominees. In his weekly address this weekend, Obama punched back:

Just two days ago, a senator from Utah promised to obstruct every single American I appoint to a judgeship or public service position – unless I fire the consumer watchdog I put in place to protect the American people from financial schemes or malpractice.

For the most part, it’s not that this senator thinks these nominees are unqualified. In fact, all of the judicial nominees being blocked have bipartisan support. And almost 90 percent have unanimous support from the Judiciary Committee.

Instead, one of his aides told reporters that the senator plans to, and I’m quoting here, “Delay and slow the process in order to get the President’s attention.”

Watch it:

Lee is, in many ways, the perfect foil to the president. While Obama wants nothing more than for the Senate to consider his nominees in a timely manner and give them an up or down vote, Lee’s short political career is marred by escalating displays of extremism and embarrassing overreach. A sample of Lee’s beliefs include:

• Child Labor Laws Are Unconstitutional: In 2010, Lee delivered a lengthy lecture on the Constitution where he praised a discarded 1918 Supreme Court decision holding that federal child labor laws violate the Constitution. In Lee’s words “This may sound harsh, but [the Constitution] was designed to be that way. It was designed to be a little bit harsh.”
• And So Is Social Security and Medicare: In the same lecture, Lee claimed that any federal program that provides health care or a retirement plan also violates the Constitution.
• And So Is Nearly Everything Else: Other things Mike Lee believes are unconstitutional include FEMA, food stamps, the FDA, and income assistance for the poor.
• The Constitution Needs A Depression Amendment: Lee is the lead sponsor of a radical constitutional amendment that would force such swift and draconian spending cuts that it would “throw about 15 million more people out of work, double the unemployment rate from 9 percent to approximately 18 percent, and cause the economy to shrink by about 17 percent instead of growing by an expected 2 percent.”
• Extorting The American People: In an interview with MSNBC’s Chris Matthews, Lee admitted that he was engaged in a campaign of extortion to force Congress to enact his radical constitutional amendment during last year’s default crisis. Lee agreed that he wants the Senate “by a two-thirds vote, to pass a constitutional amendment or he want[s] the house to come down.”
• Corporate Slush Funds For Politicians: Lee also attempted to take Citizens United to an unheard of level by creating his own slush fund, bankrolled by unlimited corporate and other donations, which Lee could then dole out to other politicians who support his radical agenda.
• Sabotage: And, of course, let’s not forget that the entire reason why President Obama needed to make his recent recess appointments is because senators like Mike Lee were filibustering Obama’s nominees to sabotage entire agencies. In Lee’s words, “I feel it is my duty to oppose [CFPB Director Richard Cordray's] confirmation as part of my opposition to the creation of CFPB itself.”

MIAMI, Florida — During an immigration roundtable at the conservative Hispanic Leadership Network conference, former Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez scolded those (primarily on the right) calling for the United States to adopt English as its official language.

Gutierrez, who served during President George W. Bush’s second term, singled out former House Speaker Newt Gingrich for criticism, telling the audience he “was surprised a little bit with the comment today of Speaker Gingrich of one government language.”

The former Commerce Secretary noted that adopting English as our official language wouldn’t be merely a symbolic measure, but would have ramifications for those who speak a different language because government documents would only be permitted to be printed in English. Currently, many government forms, from the census to election ballots, are often printed in multiple languages, depending on the needs of the community.

“Why not” allow government matters to be conducted in other languages, Gutierrez asked, rhetorically. “Why not?”

GUTIERREZ: We need more than one language in the sense of doing business with the rest of the world. So I was surprised a little bit with the comment today of Speaker Gingrich of one government language. What that means is that if you do the census, you can’t have a questioner in Spanish. Why not? Why not? We’re an international country. We do business around the world. The Chinese pick up a U.S. plan and they read it. We pick up a Chinese plan and we get dizzy. We need more people to… [applause]

Watch it:

Gingrich’s call to make English the official language follows his 2007 comments when he declared that Spanish was the “the language of the ghetto.”

Yet Gutierrez’s preferred presidential candidate, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, is not squeaky-clean on the issue either. In fact, Romney’s desire to make English the official language is identical to that of Gingrich’s.

MIAMI, Florida — Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach has been one of the most influential figures in immigration policy over the past few years, authoring the infamous anti-immigration laws passed in Arizona, Alabama, and South Carolina. This has made him highly controversial, but GOP front-runnner Mitt Romney touted Kobach’s endorsement. “With Kris on the team, I look forward to working with him to take forceful steps to curtail illegal immigration,” Romney said in press release earlier this month.

Some Hispanic Republicans have called on Romney to disassociatie himself from Kobach — the “dark lord of the anti-immigration movement” — warning his embrace will alienate Hispanic voters.

But when ThinkProgress tried to ask two key Romney backers, who also helped organize a major gathering of Hispanic Republicans here, if they worried about Kobach, we ran into a problem — they didn’t even know who he was. At the Hispanic Leadership Network conference Friday, where Romney spoke earlier, we spoke with former Senator Norm Coleman and former Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez, who have both endorsed Romney and who both helped organize the conference as chairman of its main sponsor and co-chair of the conference itself, respectively.

Asked if he thought that Kobach’s association with Romney could hurt the GOP frontrunner, Gutierrez replied, “I don’t know Kris Kobach, sorry.”

When asked the same question, Coleman stalled for a moment before telling us, “I don’t know Kobach, to be honest.” When told who he is, Coleman replied, “I have no idea.” Watch Coleman’s response:

During Monday night’s debate, the two Republican presidential front runners voiced their support for a modified DREAM Act that covers only those undocumented immigrants who are willing to serve in the United States military, and not those who attend a college or university in pursuit of a degree.

Now, a Florida Republican has introduced a bill to do just that:

Inspired by Monday night’s Republican presidential debate over immigration, Rep. David Rivera, R-Miami, filed a bill that would give young people who serve in the military — not college students — a path to U.S. citizenship.

“If somebody is willing to die for America, then certainly they deserve a chance at life in America,” Rivera said.

Rivera’s plan is called the Adjusted Residency for Military Service Act — the ARMS Act. It’s a variation on the DREAM Act, which would grant legal status to some children of undocumented immigrants who were brought illegally to the United States by their parents.

The new push for a military-only version of the DREAM Act is a not terribly subtle attempt by the Republican presidential nominees to create a wedge between military DREAMers and the college student DREAMers who have been lobbying for the bill for years. Rep. Rivera says that he is introducing the bill because it is all that Congress will likely be able to pass, even though polls show the DREAM Act has overwhelming support from every demographic, including Republicans.

Romney, Gingrich and Rep. Rivera are also at odds with former Florida Governor Jeb Bush, who yesterday said that immigration was a “secret weapon for economic competitiveness,” a view shared by President Obama during his State of the Union address on Tuesday.

Latinos in East Haven, Connecticut delivered hundreds of tacos to the town’s mayor Thursday, just two days after he made a flippant, derogatory comment about them while discussing alleged police discrimination and violence in his community.

In the wake of those allegations, Mayor Joseph Maturo Jr. was asked what he would do to reach out to the Latino community. “I might have tacos when I go home, I’m not quite sure yet,” Maturo said. The comment drew strong rebukes from area Latinos, and one group responded with a campaign to respond, as CNN reported today:

That set off the activist group, a local branch of the Reform Immigration for America organization, which said that anytime someone texts the word “taco” to 69866, it will deliver a taco to the mayor on their behalf.

They’ve received more than 2,600 texts, the group said in a statement Thursday.

Maturo twice apologized for the comments, saying his words were largely a product of stress.

Still, some 500 tacos were placed inside his office; the rest are already being rerouted to local food-assistance outlets.

The 500 tacos that were placed in Maturo’s office were eventually donated to a food-assistance charity, but even that drew controversy. Maturo issued a statement after the drop-off saying his office donated the tacos to charity. The group that delivered the tacos to his office, Reforming Immigration for America, then took to Twitter, saying Maturo’s claim was false.

“Now, Mayor Maturo claims they’re donating tacos to the soup kitchen. WE did that, he left knowing we were on our way,” the group posted on its Twitter account. Another post called the mayor’s statement “false and misleading.”