Shortly after the volcano in Iceland polluted the skies over Europe, and while the British Petroleum oil spill contaminated the Gulf of Mexico, Rand Paul dumped the intellectual equivalent of toxic pollution into the world of public discourse by claiming that it was wrong for the Civil Right Act of 1964 to outlaw segregation in private facilities.

The final resolution of last week's British election is unclear. What is clear is that the results marked a defeat for the ruling Labour Party, which received less than 30 percent of the vote nationally. Already, Prime Minister Gordon Brown has fallen on his sword, and if Labour manages to cling to power now, it will only be in a tenuous alliance with the Liberal Democrats and a handful of tiny parties. Meanwhile, David Cameron's Conservative Party, which received more votes than any other party, is in talks with the third-place Liberal Democrats to form a government.

The deregulation of the American financial industry that began in the 1970s is now widely viewed as a disaster. Even Bill Clinton has admitted that the supporters of deregulation in his administration, like Robert Rubin and Larry Summers, gave him bad advice.

On Wednesday April 7, on United Airlines flight 663, a routine flight from Washington to Denver, a Qatari diplomat named Mohammed al-Madadi smoked a cigarette in the toilet. After being confronted by a flight attendant and then a US air marshal, he is alleged to have joked that he was trying to set his shoes on fire.

That is when all hell broke loose. I know, because I was sitting in the back of the aircraft.