Part six of ThinkProgress’ profiles of right-wing groups that are taking advantage of the Citizens United ruling to flood the airways with independent attack ads. See Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, and Part 5.

The 60 Plus Association is a tax-exempt 501(c)(4) organization.

Created in 1992, the 60 Plus Association bills itself as “the conservative alternative to the American Association of Retired Persons (AARP).” It describes its agenda as “a free enterprise, less government, less taxes approach to seniors issues.”

The public face of 60 Plus is 1950s pop star and right-wing extremist Pat Boone. Boone, 78, has previously compared liberals to cancer and called President Obama’s birth certificate a “photo-shopped fraud.”

The group’s chairman is James L. Martin, a former Republican Congressional aide and long-time operative for anti-labor union and far-right independent political groups. Its president is Amy Noone Frederick is a former Republican candidate for Virginia House of Delegates and the wife of ousted Republican Party of Virginia chair and former state legislator Jeff Frederick.

Sample 60 Plus Association ad:

YouTube channel: http://www.youtube.com/user/60PlusAssociation
Twitter feed: https://twitter.com/60PlusAssoc

Graphics by Adam Peck. Christina Lewis and Ellie Sandmeyer contributed to this report

Conservative Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice David Prosser currently faces ethics charges for allegedly grabbing fellow Justice Ann Walsh Bradley by the neck during an argument in Bradley’s chambers. In response to these allegations, Prosser tried to convince a majority of his colleagues to recuse themselves from his case — a move that would effectively kill the complaint against him because it would deprive the state supreme court of the quorum it needs to hold Prosser accountable if it determines that the allegations against him have merit.

All three of Prosser’s fellow conservatives have now signed onto this plan:

Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Michael Gableman becomes the third member of the state’s high court to recuse himself from hearing the complaint against fellow Justice David Prosser.

Gableman made the expected announcement yesterday. Justices Annette Ziegler and Pat Roggensack had already said they wouldn’t take part in consideration of the complaint by the Wisconsin Judicial Commission.

Prosser argued that his fellow justices could not sit on his case because most of them witnessed the alleged choking incident. Yet, while it is usually true that a judge should not sit on a case where they are also a witness, that normal rule should not have applied here. Courts normally apply a “rule of necessity” to these sorts of cases which establishes that “a judge is not disqualified to [hear] a case because of a personal interest in the matter at issue if ‘the case cannot be heard otherwise.’”

Gableman, who provided the final vote immunizing Prosser, benefited in the past from a similar vote by his conservative colleagues. An ethics case against Gabelman for running a false ad against his predecessor was dropped his fellow conservatives voted to effectively kill it.

In an interview concerning the tragic shooting on Texas A&M campus on Monday, Gov. Rick Perry (R-TX) took a surprisingly moderate position on gun regulation. Although Perry rejected the suggestion that the shooting — the third high profile shooting in just one month — justified gun regulation in Texas, he also indicated that each state should be able to decide on its own whether or not to ban guns:

PERRY: When it gets back to this issue of taking guns away from law abiding citizens and somehow know this will make our country safer, I don’t agree with that. I think most people in Texas don’t agree with that, and that is a state by state issue frankly that should be decided in the states and not again a rush to Washington, D.C. to centralize the decision making, and them to decide what is in the best interest for the citizens and the people of Florida and Texas. That’s for the people of these states to decide.

Watch it:

Perry’s position, that each state should get to decide whether to “tak[e] guns away” from its citizens places him well to the left of the Supreme Court and the nation’s largest gun lobby. In McDonald v. Chicago, the five conservative justices held that the Second Amendment applies equally to the federal government and to state governments, so an absolute ban on guns would not be constitutional if enacted at the state level (although bans on “dangerous and unusual” weapons would remain valid). The National Rifle Association was the plaintiff in a sister case to McDonald.

Allowing each state to set its own gun policy, the position that Perry seems to embrace today, closely tracks the views expressed by dissenting Justices Stevens, Ginsburg, Breyer and Sotomayor in McDonald.

Late last week, Rep. Jeff Flake (R-AZ), who is currently campaigning for the U.S. Senate seat being vacated by retiring Sen. John Kyl (R-AZ), told a Republican gathering in Payson, Arizona that he supports abolishing the Seventeenth Amendment’s guarantee that voters elect their own senators. Prior to the Seventeenth Amendment’s ratification, the Constitution provided for senators to be selected by state legislatures, a system that was abandoned after it led to “rampant and blatant corruption, letting corporations and other moneyed interests effectively buy U.S. Senators.”

Flake, however, is not alone in his desire to make America less democratic. Indeed, at least two other GOP senate candidates, one GOP governor, one Republican senator and a Supreme Court justice all have indicated agreement with Flake’s ambition to return the Constitution to the halcyon days of the Nineteenth Century:

• Indiana Senate Candidate Richard Mourdock: Mourdock, who defeated incumbent Sen. Richard Lugar (R-IN) in a GOP primary after campaigning on a platform of refusing to compromise with Democrats, suggested at a campaign event last February that senate elections should be abolished because “the House of Representatives was there to represent the people. The Senate was there to represent the states.”
• Missouri Senate Candidate Rep. Todd Akin: Akin, the GOP nominee facing incumbent Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-MO), said during a GOP primary debate last may that “I don’t think the federal government should be doing a whole lot of things that it’s doing and it well may be that a repeal of the 17th Amendment might tend to pull that back.”
• Texas Gov. Rick Perry: Perry’s star has fallen considerably since his “oops” of a presidential campaign. Nevertheless, he remains the governor of America’s second largest state. He also believes that “The American people mistakenly empowered the federal government during a fit of populist rage in the early twentieth century by giving it an unlimited source of income (the Sixteenth Amendment) and by changing the way senators are elected (the Seventeenth Amendment).”
• Sen. Mike Lee: Lee believes that federal child labor laws, FEMA, food stamps, the FDA, Medicaid, income assistance for the poor, Medicare and Social Security violate the Constitution, so it is not surprising that he is also a seventeenther. Lee explained his opposition to his own election to the United States Senate in an interview with Fox Business.
• Justice Antonin Scalia: Scalia, who was widely criticized for his partisan rhetoric during the Supreme Court’s recent health care and immigration cases, also called for the Constitution to be changed to abolish senate elections — “I would change it back to what [the founders] wrote, in some respects. The 17th Amendment has changed things enormously.”

The Department of Justice on Friday uncovered a so-called “School-to-Prison pipeline” in Mississippi, where teachers and principals are shipping off children into the criminal justice system for infractions as small as a dress code violation.

Schools in the city of Meridian, MS, have an established practice of sending students, particularly black and disabled students, to prison for minor disciplinary problems — in clear violation of the Constitution. As ABC reports, that DOJ is claiming that the schools, which protect against “abuse of government authority in legal proceedings and fairness of due process rights,” are violating the Fourth and Fourteenth Amendments.

After months of investigation into claims of such a pipeline, the Justice Department released Friday a definitive letter revealing that the Meridian Police Department “automatically arrests all students referred to MPD by the District. The children arrested by MPD are then sent to the County juvenile justice system”:

“The system established by the City of Meridian, Lauderdale County, and DYS to incarcerate children for school suspensions ‘shocks the conscience,’ resulting in the incarceration of children for alleged ‘offenses’ such as dress code violations, flatulence, profanity, and disrespect.” The Justice Department findings letter noted.[...]

“The systematic disregard for children’s basic constitutional rights by agencies with a duty to protect and serve these children betrays the public trust,” said Thomas E. Perez, assistant attorney general for the Civil Rights Division. “We hope to resolve the concerns outlined in our findings in a collaborative fashion, but we will not hesitate to take appropriate legal action if necessary.”

The school-to-prison pipeline isn’t a new occurrence; the American Civil Liberties Union has pursued other cases of students being funneled into the prison system. In one particular case in Atlanta, the ACLU filed a class action suit against a schoolsystem that subjected its students to unreasonable searches.

Schools are supposed to be sanctuaries of education, and the threat of being sent to prison for a minor infraction likely discourages attendance for some at-risk youth.

Despite a nationwide effort by the right-wing to perpetuate the myth that voter impersonation is a serious problem, a new study by News21 once again confirms that it remains virtually non-existent in the United States.

Though perhaps useful as an argument for voter suppression tactics like voter ID laws, the Washington Post notes, the argument is not born out in facts:

The analysis of 2,068 reported fraud cases by News21, a Carnegie-Knight investigative reporting project, found 10 cases of alleged in-person voter impersonation since 2000. With 146 million registered voters in the United States, those represent about one for every 15 million prospective voters.

The News21 report is based on a national public-records search in which reporters sent thousands of requests to elections officers in all 50 states, asking for every case of alleged fraudulent activity — including registration fraud; absentee-ballot fraud; vote buying; false election counts; campaign fraud; the casting of ballots by ineligible voters, such as felons and non-citizens; double voting; and voter impersonation.

The analysis found that there is more alleged fraud in absentee ballots and voter registration than in any of the other categories. The analysis shows 491 cases of alleged absentee ballot fraud and 400 cases involving registration fraud. Requiring voters to show identification at the polls — the crux of most of the new legislation — would not have prevented those cases.

The analysis also found that more than 46 percent of the reported election fraud allegations resulted in acquittals, dropped charges or decisions not to bring charges.

Requiring voters to present government-issued photo IDs would do next-to-nothing to stop voter fraud, could cost the states millions, and could disenfranchise millions of legitimate citizen voters. But, as more and more Republicans are admitting, they could accomplish their real aim: disenfranchising enough Democrats to win elections for Republicans.

On Friday night, there were two pellet-gun shots on a mosque in the Chicago suburb Morton Grove. No one was injured, and 51-year-old David Conrad has been charged for shooting on the outer wall of the building as people prayed inside.

This was just days after Tea Party Rep. Joe Walsh (R-IL) delivered a town hall speech on the “real threat” of radical Muslims in the U.S. “trying to kill Americans every week.” Walsh made these comments just 15 miles from Morton Grove mosque:

“One thing I’m sure of is that there are people in this country – there is a radical strain of Islam in this country -– it’s not just over there –- trying to kill Americans every week. It is a real threat, and it is a threat that is much more at home now than it was after 9/11,” Walsh said.

Walsh went on to claim that radical Islam had found its way into the Chicago suburbs, including some that he represents.

“It’s here. It’s in Elk Grove. It’s in Addison. It’s in Elgin. It’s here,” he said.

Walsh was responding to a town hall participant’s question that he’s “looking for some godly men and women in the Senate, in the Congress, who will stand in the face of the danger of Islam in America without political correctness.” Salon reported the line “was met with applause.”

By branding Islam as a violent religion, Walsh incites a familiar fear-mongering tactic that lawmakers like Michele Bachmann have been widely condemned for. Yet acts of violence against American-Muslim communities are nothing new; for example, the FBI is currently investigating a suspicious fire that recently destroyed a Missouri mosque.

When political historians chronicle the moment when American conservatives finally succeeded in draining the word “freedom” of any of its natural meaning, they will cite anti-gay activist Bob Vander Plaats’ speech on Saturday announcing a multi-group effort to remove Iowa Supreme Court Justice David Wiggins from office:

“This is about freedom, not just about marriage,” Vander Plaats said in unveiling Iowans for Freedom’s campaign to oust Wiggins during the sold-out Family Leader’s Family Leadership Summit that drew 1,000 activists to the Point of Grace church.

“We see this as a freedom and constitutional issue important to all Iowans. If courts are allowed to redefine the institution of marriage, every one of the liberties we hold dear is in jeopardy.”

Brian Brown of the National Organization for Marriage pledged his group would provide a match of up to $100,000 to contributions that are made during the next two weeks in the campaign against Wiggins.

Iowans for Freedom and NOM are unlikely to be the only anti-gay groups willing to drop big money in an effort to buy a vacancy on the Iowa Supreme Court. In 2010, a similar effort to remove three justices who, like Wiggins, joined an opinion holding that the Iowa Constitution provides gay couples with the same marriage rights as everyone else, spent nearly $800,000. Much of that money came from the American Family Association, a Mississippi-based hate group which has claimed that Adolf Hitler and “virtually all of the Stormtroopers, the Brownshirts, were male homosexuals” and that marriage equality causes crop failure.