Ever since Illinois' abortive attempt to change the value of Pi, US state legislatures have had a long tradition of creative and innovative bill-making. Currently before the Montana State Legislature is the "Montana Sovereignty Protection Act". If passed, it will reject the "authority of the United Nations over the territory or people of Montana, and applying penalties".

"More to do but heading in the right direction."

- Morris Iemma, NSW ALP election campaign slogan

"Obviously, there's great work to be done. And we're doing a lot of it."

- Dick Cheney, Australian-American Leadership Dialogue breakfast, 23.2.07

The transcripts of Dick Cheney's public speeches in Sydney yesterday are available on the vice-presidential website:

• A brief, but enormously insightful comment at a breakfast for the Australian-American Leadership Dialogue at his private fortress called the Shangri-La Hotel, 7.59am Friday 23.2.07 (transcript)

"If I was running Al-Qaeda in Iraq, I would put a circle around March 2008, and pray, as many times as possible, for a victory not only for Obama, but also for the Democrats."

- John Howard, interview with Laurie Oakes, Sunday, 11.2.07

President Yahya Jammeh of The Gambia announced last month that he can cure HIV/AIDS. Apparently, it involves a mixture of herbs and bananas.

IRIN takes up the story.

We all know that businesses that use MP3 encoding for commercial purposes have to pay a licence fee to Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft, the owners of the MP3 patent. Yesterday, a US court awarded Alcatel-Lucent SA one and a half billion American dollars in damages to be paid by Microsoft for MP3 patent violation.

Associated Press takes up the story.

Former president of the Australian Medical Association, former member of the ALP, the former Education Minister who tried to claim that the story of Simpson and his donkey was true, Brendan Nelson MD is well on the way to becoming Australia's worst Defence Minister ever.

But amid all the doublespeak this week in reaction to the British and Danish troop withdrawals from Iraq, Nelson, who last week rubberstamped John Howard's whim to send more troops to Iraq, Nelson has trivialised the Second World War by saying that Australia's role in Iraq is as important as the Kokoda Track campaign against the Japanese in 1942.

"...you know have to accept that in our country we have our laws and we just administer our laws and Australia is traditionally a very egalitarian county. Therefore our laws apply to all people. We don't have exemptions from our laws for different categories of people. That's just the way we work in this country, that's just the way our country is and it will probably always be like that."

Why is it that the Howard Government's best policies only come forth during an election year? Malcolm Turnbull's plan, announced yesterday, to legislate most incandescent light bulbs out of domestic use by 2009-10 is a good one, even though it does little more than scratch the surface of the fight again carbon emission.

Turnbull's ministerial press release can be seen here in PDF format. The key number in Turnbull's statement is the estimate of an annual reduction in carbon dioxide emissions of 4 million tonnes by 2015. Wikipedia quotes UN figures giving Australia's CO2 emissions in 2002 at 356.3 million tonnes.

1978: Wran's Our Man
1988: Barrie Unsworth - He's Good Value
2007: More to do but heading in the right direction

One of these won in a landslide, one lost in a landslide, one is expected to win for the simple reason that his opponent is worse.