President Obama's cool, cerebral, logical style has drawn comparisons to Mr. Spock of Star Trek, as played by Leonard Nimoy in the original series from the 1960s. Like that half-Vulcan, half-human Spock, Obama is a man of two worlds, of White America and Black America, of Kansas and Kenya. Like Spock, he's a careful thinker, a man who measures his words with precision, a man who seems to pride himself in being in control of his emotions.

Yet perhaps the most telling similarity between fictional Spock and factual Obama is their lack of command experience. Spock was Captain Kirk's loyal first officer. An expert in science, he had no desire to gain the captain's chair. Before he gained the Oval Office, Obama was a community organizer, a law professor, a state senator, and a U.S. senator. Respectable positions, but not ones requiring a command presence.

Both lack Kirk-like swagger, yet each had to take command. In Spock's case, it came in the Star Trek episode, "The Galileo Seven." His decisions, the criticisms he faces, even his mistakes are uncannily like those of Obama in his first year of office.

A public mass overdose of homeopathic remedies has forced the New Zealand Council of Homeopaths to admit openly that their products do not contain any "material substances". Council spokeswoman Mary Glaisyer admitted publicly that "there´s not one molecule of the original substance remaining" in the diluted remedies that form the basis of this multi-million-dollar industry.

"People did not know what was in the [health care] plan, and some of that was just poor reporting, some of it was deliberate misinformation."