Our guest columnist represented New York’s 26th District until this afternoon.

Through the Internet, with a few keystrokes and the click of a button, a young person can call up information for a research project, make new friends or discover new hobbies.

At the same time, responding to what may seem like a friendly e-mail or an appealing marketing offer can have serious consequences. Private information and images can so easily be transmitted to friends and strangers alike.

Indeed, for as much promise as the Internet offers young people in the form of educational resources and social connections, there is great concern about the dangers and unknowns associated with a medium that is growing by several billion web pages per day.

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“A spokesperson for Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Texas) told The Hill on Wednesday afternoon that the congressman plans to introduce legislation that will allow members of Congress to carry weapons both in the District of Columbia and on the House floor.” [The Hill]

“Twain himself defined a ‘classic’ as ‘a book which people praise and don’t read.’ Rather than see Twain’s most important work succumb to that fate, Twain scholar Alan Gribben and NewSouth Books plan to release a version of Huckleberry Finn, in a single volume with The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, that does away with the ‘n’ word (as well as the ‘in’ word, ‘Injun’) by replacing it with the word ‘slave.'” [Publishers Weekly]

“Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour (R) announced late Wednesday that he will grant an early release from prison to two sisters serving unusually long sentences for armed robbery. Gladys and Jamie Scott have each served 16 years of a life sentence. Their case had become a cause celebre among civil rights groups, including the NAACP, which mounted a national campaign to free the women.” [WaPo]

So, where’s our Good Ol’ Boy today? Ah, yes — trying on hairshirts:

“When asked why my hometown in Mississippi did not suffer the same racial violence when I was a young man that accompanied other towns’ integration efforts, I accurately said the community leadership wouldn’t tolerate it and helped prevent violence there. My point was my town rejected the Ku Klux Klan, but nobody should construe that to mean I think the town leadership were saints, either. Their vehicle, called the ‘Citizens Council,’ is totally indefensible, as is segregation. It was a difficult and painful era for Mississippi, the rest of the country, and especially African Americans who were persecuted in that time.”

Good for you, Haley. Saves us the trouble of looking into that nasty NAACP business.

But y’know, maybe you should have trotted that line out the first time…

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Let’s start with this bulky excerpt from a Weekly Standard profile of Haley Barbour, discussing his beloved childhood home of Yazoo City, Mississippi:

Both Mr. Mott and Mr. Kelly had told me that Yazoo City was perhaps the only municipality in Mississippi that managed to integrate the schools without violence. I asked Haley Barbour why he thought that was so.

“Because the business community wouldn’t stand for it,” he said. “You heard of the Citizens Councils? Up north they think it was like the KKK. Where I come from it was an organization of town leaders. In Yazoo City they passed a resolution that said anybody who started a chapter of the Klan would get their ass run out of town. If you had a job, you’d lose it. If you had a store, they’d see nobody shopped there. We didn’t have a problem with the Klan in Yazoo City.”

In interviews Barbour doesn’t have much to say about growing up in the midst of the civil rights revolution. “I just don’t remember it as being that bad,” he said. “I remember Martin Luther King came to town, in ’62. He spoke out at the old fairground and it was full of people, black and white.”

If you missed the reference, the White Citizens Councils (until 1956) didn’t enjoy the best press, back in the day. Back in this day, mentioning them set off a few red flags:

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1. “Index the retirement age to longevity — i.e., increase the retirement age to qualify for Social Security — to age 69 by 2075.”

2. “Increase the Social Security contribution ceiling: while people only pay Social Security taxes on the first $106,800 of their wages today, that’s only about 86% of the total potentially taxable wages. The co-chairs suggest raising the ceiling to capture 90% of wages.”

The Grand Compromise: For every point we increase taxable income, we increase the retirement age by a year. We’ll be happy to tax 100 percent of income, as long as you’re happy to wait until 79 to retire.

Fiscal Commission Co-Chairs Simpson And Bowles Release Eye-Popping Recommendations [TPM]