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Party of the pocketbook
As the latest Bush recession heads into its second dip, it's washing away one of the oldest truisms in American politics.
When I was growing up in the '60s and '70s, conventional wisdom about our political parties was clear: Democrats stuck up for working people and minorities, but you couldn't trust them with your money. For that, you wanted a Republican. This reached a head in the late '70s, as Jimmy Carter faced runaway inflation, oil shocks and unemployment, and couldn't seem to make headway against them. Reagan's election brought a recession, a tax cut and a deepening federal deficit -- but one way or another he got credit in the national mythology for dispelling the Carter malaise and putting the economy right.
Since Reagan, though, a new pattern has emerged, not just in the reality of the economy's numbers but in the shorthand of the popular mind. Bush I: Recession. Clinton: Economic growth. Bush II: Recession.
Circumstance and luck play a huge part in all this, to be sure. But patterns like these are what build popular myths. If Bush doesn't begin improving the fumbling performance of his economic team, or break free of his "tax cut or die" ideology, he could inherit a cruel variation on James Carville's mantra from the 1992 election -- as "It's the economy, stupid" gets transformed in the popular mind to "It's stupid's economy."
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John Robb asks for a tool that would put his most-visited sites into a Web ring and let him click from one to the next. Opera -- my favorite browser, hands down -- handles this nicely: You can tell it to open all the sites in a bookmark folder in a series of windows, then just click from one to the next.
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Reorganizing the back catalog
If you haven't checked out Salon's spiffy new upgraded article directory, you're missing out. In its seven-year history Salon has published tens of thousands of articles on every subject under the sun. The directory helps you find your way through this. You'll also find a nifty "most popular topics" feature at the bottom of the directory's main page.
When you access most older Salon stories you will now find them reformatted at a dir.salon.com URL. If you want to see the page in its original format, there's a link at the bottom -- or just change the URL to archive.salon.com.
On the other hand, apologies are in order for the state of our search engine, which actually indexes Salon well but does not handle multi-word searches well -- and that's the most common kind of search. We're still working on it; in the meantime, Google does a fantastic job of searching Salon, as it always has.
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Character assassination of SpamAssassin
There are many unpleasant new developments in the world of the Internet to bemoan, but the growing prevalence of spam filters is not one of them. We installed one of the best, SpamAssassin, here at Salon internally earlier this year, and it is a godsend. More recently we installed it on the mail server at the Well so users of Well e-mail accounts could benefit from SpamAssassin's capabilities.
So why is online-news pundit Steve Outing complaining about spam filters? Outing suggests that spam filters will somehow censor content on the Net because people will avoid using the controversial words that "trigger" the filters. He writes from the perspective of an e-mail newsletter publisher who's worried that his product is being improperly blocked by the filters, and singles out SpamAssassin as the main offender.
The trouble is, he misunderstands the way SpamAssassin is installed by people who know what they're doing. One of the great things about it is that it doesn't automatically delete spam; the way we use it, it tags incoming e-mails as probable spam. The user can then use his e-mail client to filter these probable spams into a separate mailbox for review and deletion. This is, in fact, the way the Well uses it too (Outing misreports this).
A bad spam filter can indeed raise the danger of "false positives" -- filtering out e-mail that you wanted to receive. But in truth, there's little danger of Outing's newsletter, or anyone else's, being invisibly trashed by SpamAssassin. You can "whitelist" mail from any recipient you want -- basically telling the filter, "Don't tag this person's mail as spam, no matter what."
SpamAssassin isn't perfect, but it's a step up the evolutionary ladder. It regularly sifts out hundreds of spams a day from my inbox. And after the first day's fine-tuning, it hasn't delivered a single "false positive." I'm sorry to see it unfairly maligned.
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