We are fighting for our children's education and our nation's future," Dunbar said. "In Texas we have certain statutory obligations to promote patriotism and to promote the free enterprise system. There seems to have been a move away from a patriotic ideology. There seems to be a denial that this was a nation founded under God. We had to go back and make some corrections.

The Republican-controlled Board of Education has altered curriculum so that the state’s 4.8 million students are taught to question the United Nations, Social Security and Medicare; closely study the “conservative resurgence” of the 1980s and ’90s; and learn the Judeo-Christian influences on the Founding Fathers. Removed: The suggestion that hip-hop is part of a social movement. Breathe easy, Texas.

Texas is currently in yet another controversy about Conservative Christians rewriting school textbooks to remove references to evolution, slavery and the separation of church and state.

The quote above is from Synthia Dunbar, who is an evangelical Christian who is trying to force her views on all the children in her school district.

Interestingly, she - and others like Don McLeroy (a member of the Texas board of education) - is out and open about how this is a battle of ideas.

The people who are fighting against this attempt to rewrite history and indoctrinate children are trying to focus on having "independent" and "impartial" education and textbooks, written by "experts" rather than ideologues.

I wonder (and I'm not sure whether this is the right tack) whether a better approach is to mobilise opposition to the Conservatives by acknowledging the "culture war". The Conservatives have already opened the door. They are out and out attacking "liberals" and "left-wingers".

Should reasonable people concerned about lunatics taking over their schools and the curriculums of their children galvanise support by promoting an ethical, respectful and progressive alternative? Should there be explicitly "liberal" textbooks.

This would at least create a counterpoint to the conservatives, who call existing textbooks liberal propaganda.

At most, it would energise progressive people in the communities under attack by evangelical conservative ideologues.

A revamp of the social-news site Digg has unexpectedly backfired on its owners.

When I heard about a year ago that Digg (a link sharing social networking site) was getting a redesign, I was fairly optimistic. Afterall, sites have to constantly update as technology and users advance.

I even got to get an early look at the "new" Digg - after successfully applying to use the beta version.

The redesign of Digg - which happened a few days ago - has turned into a disaster. By all accounts, the new features are not widely liked, and many popular features have gone.

Every social network suffers a backlash when it makes changes. Most regular users of Digg for example are used to how it used to work. Major changes disrupt people's habits and create resentment.

Facebook found this out in its early stages - every time it changed its home page, group after group was created calling on the changes to be reversed. Eventually, Facebook started to make small changes incrementally, rather than large overhauls. Google has made the same mistake with overhauling its (once) excellent Google News service.

Digg's problem is that it didn't phase in its changes, to allow its regular users to grow comfortable with the changes. Instead, there is a form of system shock.

I am an infrequent user of Digg - and I much preferred the old version. In particular, I liked the fact that Digg had sections for different kinds of news - political, opinion, environment, design - that I could browse. I enjoyed finding different kinds of news that I didn't get from the normal news websites I visit.

The new Digg focuses on pushing links that have been "dugg" (shared) by your friends and other accounts you've chosen to follow. As a result, it creates a homogenous list of links for you. The appeal of Digg - to me - was finding new links that I wouldn't have otherwise found.

There are a lot of other issues I have with the New Digg - and there are some improvements.

However, if Digg survives the "flight" of users, it should implement any future changes more incrementally.

There is some really amazing Obama art from 2007-2008 in this book. Not just official posters and design, but the creative work of scores of supporters.

It's a shame that it doesn't look like the same people are as inspired about Obama in 2010 for the mid-term elections.

TENS of millions of dollars in Australian government aviation contracts have been awarded to companies that secured their bids with inside information about tenders provided by senior public servants.

Confidential emails obtained by The Age reveal two Defence Department officers working in the unit responsible for a $30-million-a-year contract to fly Australian troops to the Middle East were providing information during the tender process to the company later declared the winner.

The two Defence officials, Army Reserve captain and aviation consultant David Charlton and army warrant officer John Davies, were then given senior management jobs by the 2005 contract winner, Strategic Aviation, which has provided the troop flights to Kuwait since then.

Of course, all of this happened from 2005-2007 - during the Howard years.

Liberal deputy leader Julie Bishop says Prime Minister Julia Gillard has lost her mandate to form government after Labor has lost its lead in the two-party preferred vote.

Labor is now back in the lead as far as the Two Party Preferred Vote goes. I';m sure Julie Bishop will now do the honourable and decent thing and correct her statement.

We only update the PageRank displayed in Google Toolbar a few times a year; this is our respectful hint for you to worry less about PageRank, which is just one of over 200 signals that can affect how your site is crawled, indexed and ranked.

Amazingly, I've discovered that some people with a dangerous level of knowledge about the Internet (just enough to get into trouble, not enough to realise how little they know) can obsess about Page Rank.

Google says: "worry less about Page Rank". So there you go.

What counts in today’s media for holding the Greens to account, is juvenile ramblings about communists, vegetarians and economic irresponsibility. Puerile nonsense, and not just at the ABC, but in Kelly’s own paper FFS.

That Bob Brown was able to parade around whacking the government for revising it’s reduced corporate tax rate upwards to 29% in the new MRRT when the Greens policy is to increase corporate tax to 33% with no questions from the media about this inconsistency shows how incompetent most journos are.

Equally so, when Sarah Hanson-Young on a Sky panel on Boats! during the campaign answered a question about the humaneness of allowing asylum seekers to sail in leaky boats to Australia for processing (Greens policy), when off shore processing (not Greens policy) at least stops these dangerous journeys. Hanson-Young replied that the Greens would hire charter boats, even use the Navy to transport asylum seekers from Indonesia, or wherever to Australia for processing. At the time, I checked the Greens website, and couldn’t find this listed anywhere. This new position, seemingly developed on the spot by Hanson-Young went completely unreported. Imagine if one of the major parties had suggested such an expensive, and unrealistic response?

There have been countless other examples. If Kelly wants the minor parties held to account, he should be encouraging his paper to lead by example and get its journos to familiarise themselves with Greens policies, and use that as a basis for criticism, rather than the stuff we usually see in his paper about the party and its members. I noticed after the election, Brown was asked about the 33% corporate tax rate. Obviously an enterprising journo, upon hearing the Greens will have the BoP in the Senate, decided to do some actual legwork and bone up on Greens policies. Hopefully there will be more of this kind of scrutiny, and less of the other, more hysterical and shrill kind.

I think one of the prime examples for me is the abject derision by Bob Brown and other Greens Party MPs and candidates of Julia Gillard's "citizens assembly" on climate change - despite the fact that it is Greens Party policy to support citizens assemblies and other community engagement mechanisms on all major government policy.

Three months ago, I posed for my college graduation photo—the official one in front of an American flag, diploma in hand, ready to face the world.

Emma has appeared in countless news stories as stock image representing the future of unemployed youth. Her reflections as an unintentional internet news sensation is a remarkable human story (and I don't normally like these things).

''We have no fixed demands or positions,'' Mr Barber said yesterday. ''We are simply going to try to achieve outcomes for the Greens.''

I'm sure that the many Greens Party members, activists, volunteers and supporters would be shocked to hear that Victorian Greens Party leader Greg Barber has said there are "no fixed demands or positions".

What about the Greens Party platform and policy? Are they not fixed? Are Greens Party leaders just able to ignore them in order to "achieve outcomes"?