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.