Post installation

I was trying to override a module's CSS and having no luck and I finally realized it's because my theme's style.css is being loaded first, before the various modules' CSS. I searched and found this reference in an acidfree issue:

A module that calls init_theme() breaks this order.

Alright, so im very new to drupal, but I can tell its a very powerfull tool -- if i can just get over my initial first hurdles. I want to create a site with a number of different features, including user blogs, but I cant get the news section sorted.

I've created a Vocabulary called News, with terms including Politics, Sci/Tech etc.

I have created a nice shortened URL so that you can view politics through url.com/news/politics, but i can't get url.com/news to work, and show me an overview of all the latest news.

Is there anyway to get variables from url. I tried the code $_GET['q']=="news") in page.tpl.php, but that didn't work. I try to attain the way to show different banners in different sections on the site. I hope there is someone who can help me with this =)

have successfully loaded tinymce, turned on as a module , set up a profile and turned on access permissions but cant see any text editor ...am lost to know what to do ?

i have installed forum_access module, and restricting forum access to certain user roles works just fine, but i have trouble assigning moderators to forums. when i select user(moderator) in forum settings, nothing happens, selected user still doesn't have edit/delete permissions in this forum.

any help?

I know there is a word censor but is there a filter somewhere that allows replacement of words. Say a member types one word and we'd prefer it to be replaced by others.

For example

IMO would be replaced with In My Honest Opinion
or btw - by the way.

It would also be great for common mispelled words.

Any any ideas ?