This week, the Tucson Citizen, Arizona’s leading site for bloggers and citizen journalists, has pulled the plug on one of their most popular and controversial columnists.

David Morales’ blog, the Three Sonorans saw over 1.6 million visitors to the site — last year, his blog singlehandedly crashed the Tucson Citizen when he broke the story of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords’ tragic shooting — but despite his readership, the threat of a lawsuit by Arizona State Rep. Daniel Patterson became the proverbial last straw for Tucson Citizen editor Mark Evans.

In email correspondence published this week on the Range, Rep. Patterson — who is currently facing an ethics investigation, per a report released last week by the Arizona House Ethics Committee that claims the politician has a lurid history of unprofessional behaviour towards staff and offered to trade sex for votes — took issue to the following line in Morales’ post, “Is The World Conspiring Against Rep. Patterson?”:

“Then again, I don’t know what it is like to have rich parents or a father who was a mayor to shower privilege upon me by hiring lawyers to always get charges dropped.”

Rep. Patterson wrote to Evans:

Total lie. This racist liar doesn’t know me or my family. Why do you continue to host him? His BS on this issue could cause a big lawsuit. Daniel

Evans mediated the dispute by asking Morales to remove the line and then delete an entire post entitled, “A Quick Lesson In Racism For Rep. Patterson And Other Non-Minorities.”

Read the full story at the Huffington Post