https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanging_in_the_United_States

Currently, only New Hampshire has a law specifying hanging as an available secondary method of execution, now only applicable to one person, who was sentenced to capital punishment by the state prior to its repeal in 2019.

The hanging of Billy Bailey is likely to be the final hanging in the United States, considering that all three of the states that maintained hanging as a secondary method of execution alongside lethal injection after the 1976 restoration of the death penalty have now abolished executions. Delaware’s Supreme Court declared the death penalty to be in violation of their state constitution in 2016,[21] Washington abolished executions in 2018,[22] and New Hampshire abolished executions in 2019.[23] However, the last person on death row in the three states is Michael K. Addison in New Hampshire, convicted in 2008 of the 2006 murder of Michael Briggs, an on-duty police officer. Should the state carry out Addison’s execution, the method could be hanging if lethal injection was found unconstitutional or inefficient, or if he chooses to be executed by hanging.

Talk about a go-down-in-the-history-books opportunity.

kagis

I don’t see specifically an airliner (i.e. large-body commercial passenger aircraft), but there have been other aircraft:

https://www.news.com.au/travel/travel-updates/incidents/deadly-nyc-helicopter-crash-adds-to-tragic-list-of-crashes-in-hudson-river/news-story/9d714b89e09b61c0c3a40bd19b73406e

Deadly NYC helicopter crash adds to tragic list of crashes in Hudson River

Later the same year as the “Miracle on the Hudson”, nine people died when a tourist helicopter and a small private plane collided mid-air and plunged into the Hudson River on August 8, 2009.

Another plane went down in the Hudson River in May 2016.

A World War Two-era plane — a P-47 Thunderbolt — crashed during a celebration for the American Airpower Museum’s 75th anniversary. The pilot, William Gordon, died.

Then in 2019, a charter helicopter crashed in the Hudson River near a heliport after refuelling.

It does create an odd situation in the senate about voting him out.

Sounds like there’s a bunch of unresolved constitutional law questions there too. There’s apparently a literalist reading of the Constitution that the Vice President should preside over his own impeachment trial. Normally, the Vice President presides over the Senate. The Constitution explicitly says says that the Chief Justice rather than the Vice President presides if the President is being tried; but has no special exception in the text for if the Vice President himself is being impeached.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vice_President_of_the_United_States

In their capacity as president of the Senate, the vice president may preside over most impeachment trials of federal officers, although the Constitution does not specifically require it. However, whenever the president of the United States is on trial, the Constitution requires that the chief justice of the United States must preside. This stipulation was designed to avoid the possible conflict of interest in having the vice president preside over the trial for the removal of the one official standing between them and the presidency.[49] In contrast, the Constitution is silent about which federal official would preside were the vice president on trial by the Senate.[13][50] No vice president has ever been impeached, thus leaving it unclear whether an impeached vice president could, as president of the Senate, preside at their own impeachment trial.

Then the process involves a vote in the Senate. On two occasions in the past, the Senate has in fact tied:

https://theconversation.com/the-senate-has-actually-tied-in-an-impeachment-trial-twice-130939

The Senate has actually tied in an impeachment trial – twice

The Vice President…holds a tie-breaking vote in the Senate.

https://www.legbranch.org/can-the-vice-president-vote-in-a-presidential-impeachment-trial/

In other words, the Constitution designates the Vice President the President of the Senate and gives the Vice President the power to cast tie-breaking votes. Yet the Constitution only designates the Chief Justice the presiding officer in presidential impeachment trials. The Constitution does not designate the Chief Justice the President of the Senate, nor does it give the Chief Justice the power to cast tie-breaking votes. This suggests that the Vice President retains the power to cast tie-breaking votes in presidential impeachment trials.

For bonus points, Vance is a lawyer, and I suppose could represent himself as well.

Anti-Vance Senator: “And, Mr. President, was that the point where the Vice President committed the treasonous crime requiring his impeachment and removal from office?”

Trump: “Yes, and…”

Vance (acting as Vance’s attorney): “Objection!”

Vance (acting as presiding officer over Vance’s trial): “Sustained. The court orders the statement to be stricken from the record and, further, observes that the witness is a whiny bitch.”

Vance (acting as holder of tie-breaking Senate vote): “Given that there seems to be a lack of evidence, I’m just going to come out right now and say that I don’t think that I can vote against the defendant.”

Vance (acting as defendant): “Woohoo! Score!”

EDIT: I don’t actually know whether the presiding officer when the Senate is acting as a court uses regular judicial procedure — could probably go dig up transcripts of past impeachments to find out — so the above phrasing may not be correct, but it’s still a pretty zany hypothetical.

EDIT2:

Trump: “This trial is a farce!”

Vance (acting as presiding officer over Vance’s trial): begins slamming Senate gavel “Order! Order! The witness will be silent!”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbols_of_the_United_States_Senate

The gavel deteriorated during the 1940s, and in 1952 silver pieces were attached to try to limit further damage. However, in 1954, Then-Vice President Richard Nixon pounded it during a heated debate over atomic energy, and it completely came apart. Officials wanted to recreate the gavel exactly, but not enough ivory was available commercially; Senate officials therefore contacted the government of India for help in sourcing the correct amount of ivory. On November 17, 1954, the Vice-President of India, Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, presented the assembled Senate with a replacement gavel, which is still in use today.

Senate gavel comes apart again

Vance (acting as presiding officer over Vance’s trial): “Damn. Finding more elephants these days is going to be a pain.”

Trump: “I’ll say whatever I feel like!”

Vance (acting as presiding officer over Vance’s trial): “The sergeant at arms will remove the unruly witness!”

Jennifer Hemmingway: “Let’s go, Mr. President.”

Well, he might not be removed from office, but how much is holding the office actually worth if it has no political power?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Nance_Garner

John Nance Garner III (November 22, 1868 – November 7, 1967), known among his contemporaries as “Cactus Jack”, was the 32nd vice president of the United States, serving from 1933 to 1941, under President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Like most vice presidents in this era, Garner had little to do and little influence on the president’s policies. He famously described the vice presidency as being “not worth a bucket of warm piss” (for many years, this quote was bowdlerized as “warm spit”).

It sounds like the low fuel situation wasn’t directly related to the crash.

Videos posted on social media captured large chunks of the helicopter, including rotor blades spinning independently of the fuselage, falling from the sky and splashing into the river on Thursday afternoon, not long after the tourist flight had taken off from a popular heliport at the tip of Manhattan.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesus_nut

Jesus nut is a slang term for the main rotor retaining nut[1] or mast nut, which holds the main rotor to the mast of some helicopters. The related slang term Jesus pin refers to the lock pin used to secure the retaining nut. More generally, Jesus nut (or Jesus pin) is used to refer to any component that is a single point of failure and whose breakdown would result in catastrophic consequences, the suggestion being that in such case the only thing left to do would be to pray to Jesus, or that the component’s importance could be likened to the importance of Jesus to Christianity.

In April 2025, 6 people (a family of 5 plus the pilot) were killed in New York when the Bell 206 helicopter they were travelling in suffered a suspected mid-flight detachment of its main rotor blade. Early speculation pinned the blame on an incorrectly installed or serviced Jesus nut.[7]

If it had been just fuel exhaustion, it’d still have been possible to bring the helicopter down via autorotation:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autorotation

The most common use of autorotation in helicopters is to safely land the aircraft in the event of an engine failure or tail-rotor failure. It is a common emergency procedure taught to helicopter pilots as part of their training.

In normal powered helicopter flight, air is drawn into the main rotor system from above and forced downward, but during autorotation, air moves into the rotor system from below as the helicopter descends. Autorotation is permitted mechanically because of both a freewheeling unit, which allows the main rotor to continue turning even if the engine is not running, as well as aerodynamic forces of relative wind maintaining rotor speed. It is the means by which a helicopter can land safely in the event of complete engine failure or other mechanical issue which disconnects the engine from the rotor system. Consequently, all single-engine helicopters must demonstrate this capability to obtain a type certificate.

I mean, if you’re the Vice President, it’s kind of hard to put much pressure on the President. The Vice President has virtually no power or formal responsibilities other than what the President chooses to delegate to him. I mean, if he annoys the President, the President can very readily leave him with nothing other than a bit of prestige and a tie-breaking vote in the Senate.

Though the President can’t actually remove the Vice President, no matter how unhappy with him he is.

undermining

Prior to the base commander commenting and destroying his effort, Vance was on totally firm ground and had pretty much convinced the entire population of Greenland.

It sounds like Jackson didn’t refuse to perform any enforcement of SCOTUS decisions. Rather, he observed that Georgia — which was the entity supposed to do so, wasn’t likely to do so. Georgia ultimately did back down.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worcester_v._Georgia

Worcester v. Georgia, 31 U.S. (6 Pet.) 515 (1832), was a landmark case in which the United States Supreme Court vacated the conviction of Samuel Worcester and held that the Georgia criminal statute that prohibited non-Native Americans from being present on Native American lands without a license from the state was unconstitutional.

In a popular quotation that is believed to be apocryphal, President Andrew Jackson reportedly responded: “John Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce it!”[7][8] This quotation first appeared twenty years after Jackson’s death in newspaper publisher Horace Greeley’s 1865 history of the U.S. Civil War, The American Conflict.[8] It was reported in the press in March 1832 that Jackson was unlikely to aid in carrying out the court’s decision if his assistance were to be requested.[9] In an April 1832 letter to John Coffee, Jackson wrote that “the decision of the Supreme Court has fell still born, and they find that they cannot coerce Georgia to yield to its mandate.”[7][10] In a letter in March 1832, Virginia politician David Campbell reported a private conversation in which Jackson had “sportively” suggested calling on the Massachusetts state militia to enforce the order if the Supreme Court requested he intervene, because Jackson believed Northern partisans had brought about the court’s ruling.[10]

The Court did not ask federal marshals to carry out the decision.[11] Worcester thus imposed no obligations on Jackson; there was nothing for him to enforce,[12][13] although Jackson’s political enemies conspired to find evidence, to be used in the forthcoming political election, to claim that he would refuse to enforce the Worcester decision.

Eighteen days later, on November 24, the state of South Carolina issued an Ordinance of Nullification, a separate and unrelated attempt by a state to defy federal authority.[18] This began a series of events known as the Nullification Crisis. In an effort to isolate Georgia from South Carolina, the Jackson administration changed course in their approach to the Worcester decision.

On December 22, Georgia repealed the law under which Worcester and Butler were imprisoned, allowing them to petition for a pardon without having to take an oath to leave the state of Georgia or Cherokee land.[27] On January 8, 1833, the missionaries petitioned for their pardon, but it did not contain an admission they had broken state law, and Lumpkin believed its wording was insulting to the state of Georgia. Representatives for both sides negotiated for a new letter to be drafted by the missionaries, which was delivered to Lumpkin the following day. In the final letter, Worcester and Butler appealed to the “magnanimity of the State” of Georgia to end their prison sentences.[28] On January 14, Lumpkin issued a general proclamation,[29] not a formal pardon.[30] Worcester and Butler were freed from prison.[31]

On top of that, a president also doesn’t have a general immunity to criminal law. The Supreme Court dispute a bit back was over a limited matter of whether a president could be subject to criminal law for acts of the government that he orders in some cases.

If Trump pulls out a pistol and murders someone, he’s subject to criminal law for that.

It sounds like the act in question wasn’t an official action from the government, but something that he did while campaigning.

On top of that, he wasn’t even president at the time anyway.

That being said, IIRC the question of whether a president can pardon himself for federal crimes is still open, and in any case it’s not controversial that he could use the Nixon trick where he resigns and then has the vice president or whoever replaces him pardon him, if we’re talking federal criminal law.

It sounds like he was advocating for creating drug addiction treatment facilities.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/politics/government/fact-check-yes-rfk-jr-proposed-sending-people-with-drug-problems-to-wellness-farms/ar-AA1usVuj

What’s True:

Kennedy said he would create rehabilitation wellness farms where people with drug-related issues (including with psychiatric drugs) can go for a program of rehabilitation that would include job training and growing organic food for their own consumption.

What’s False:

However, contrary to how some people interpreted his words, Kennedy did not say or imply anyone would be “sent” to such locations against their will.

Like, you mean that people with autism might be negatively-impacted in some way? I haven’t been following the whole RFK thing, but from what I have read, I don’t think that he’s been upset at people with autism or said that being around people with autism is an issue. He’s just promoted a really bad take spawned by a claim from Andrew Wakefield that combining certain vaccines rather than taking them separately could cause autism.

Like, the risk here is that he’s going to use his influential position to encourage people to not be vaccinated, and that that is going to cause a lot of deaths and harm from disease when vaccine use falls off.

https://people.com/rfk-jr-heroin-use-top-of-class-student-8752783

“I did very, very poorly in school, until I started doing narcotics,” Kennedy, 70, said on the podcast. “Then I went to the top of my class because my mind was so restless and turbulent and I could not sit still.”

“It worked for me,” he continued of his past heroin use. “And if it still worked, I’d still be doing it.”

rubs eyeballs

Honestly, I don’t even know how The Onion deals with RFK.

kagis

https://theonion.com/rfk-jr-orders-removal-of-sinks-from-hhs-bathrooms/

RFK Jr. Orders Removal Of Sinks From HHS Bathrooms

WASHINGTON—As part of a sweeping overhaul of the building’s plumbing system, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. reportedly ordered the removal of sinks Tuesday from all bathrooms in the Department of Health and Human Services headquarters. “People across the world lived for thousands of years without sinks, and they were just fine—healthier, even,” said Kennedy, who noted that the cuts would not only save taxpayers thousands of dollars in maintenance and water bills each year, but be better for the environment as well.

Yeah. I kind of feel like The Onion RFK is more-plausible than real life RFK.

EDIT: By way of completely driving the point home with a sledgehammer:

https://theonion.com/vaccine-critic-rfk-jr-backs-measles-vaccine-amid-deadly-outbreak/

Vaccine Critic RFK Jr. Backs Measles Vaccine Amid Deadly Outbreak

Though he stopped short of urging people to get the shot, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a noted vaccine critic, acknowledged the value of the measles vaccine amid a deadly outbreak in Texas. What do you think?

When Zero Hedge is in the White House press pool and the Associated Press is banned. Man.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero_Hedge

The 29 April 2016 “Unmasking Zero Hedge” article by Bloomberg quoted former website staffer Colin Lokey as saying: “I can’t be a 24-hour cheerleader for Hezbollah, Moscow, Tehran, Beijing, and Trump anymore. It’s wrong. Period. I know it gets you views now, but it will kill your brand over the long run. This isn’t a revolution. It’s a joke.” Lokey told Bloomberg that he was pressured to frame issues in a way he felt was “disingenuous”, summarizing its political stances as “Russia=good. Obama=idiot. Bashar al-Assad=benevolent leader. John Kerry=dunce. Vladimir Putin=greatest leader in the history of statecraft.”

Navarro says stock plunge is ‘no big deal’

I’ve mostly ignored him, but earlier this week, I skimmed two past interviews with him, and based on what I saw there, that’s kind of what I’d expect from him.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Navarro

Navarro’s views on trade are significantly outside the mainstream of economic thought, and are widely considered fringe by other economists.[a] A strong proponent of reducing U.S. trade deficits, Navarro is well known for his hardline views on China, describing the country as an existential threat to the United States. He has accused China of unfair trade practices and currency manipulation and called for more confrontational policies towards the country.[6] He has called for increasing the size of the American manufacturing sector, setting high tariffs, and “repatriating global supply chains”. He is also a vocal opponent of free trade agreements.

So, I’m assuming that you mean ^NDX, the NASDAQ 100 index.

https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/^NDX/

• A lot of the drop was from the beginning of the month and the five-day period misses that but included rebound from that as Trump announced suspension of the global tariffs.

• The NASDAQ 100 reflects a narrower — if important — sector of the economy; it weights tech companies more heavily. The S&P 500 (^GSPC) (large companies) and Russell 2000 (^RUT) (smaller companies) took a larger hit.

Trump’s announcement was on April 2nd.

From April 2nd to today:

• ^NDX is down 6.3%.

• ^GSPC is down 7.1%.

• ^RUT is down 10.4%.

If I’d had to guess, American tech companies — with a heavier representation in the NASDAQ 100 — probably are generally less exposed to the cost of importing goods to the US than are most US companies, though as global companies that export, they certainly stand to be hit by things like countertariffs.

Also, it’s not two quarters of the stock market being down, but GDP. What’s being talked about in this article is the stock market. I mean, yeah, they’re linked, but the stock market is going to be considerably more-volatile and reflects investor beliefs about future economic activity. After some bouncing around, the S&P 500 is down something like 10% as of today since the beginning of the month. US GDP has not dropped 10% in the past week-and-a-half.

EDIT:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Okun's_law

Okun’s law states that a one-point increase in the cyclical unemployment rate is associated with two percentage points of negative growth in real GDP.

If we’d had the GDP fall off by 10% in the past week and a half, we’d expect something like one in twenty Americans to have lost their jobs in the past week and a half.

Another Wall Street Journal article, this one from yesterday:

https://www.wsj.com/opinion/trumps-provocation-principle-fear-intimidation-tactics-6cb749b6

Trump’s Provocation Principle

The administration is too addicted to shock, awe and intimidation to see the harm it is doing to itself.

Some snippets:

Though the chaos seems to defy analysis, one element is frightfully common to current domestic, economic, and foreign policies: the consistent overestimation of powers necessary to accomplish aims. At home and abroad, President Trump has pitted his objectives against allies, enemies, rivals, and friends, not as a matter of miscalculation but, in the glaring absence of calculation, amid a tsunami of haphazard impulses.

And the things that are broken belong to the American people, not to Messrs. Trump and Musk, whose defiant enjoyment of being bad boys is unseemly and undignified. The Republican Party, or what is left of it, will suffer for years to come as a result of the gross overestimation of impermanent political advantage.

Challenging the whole world to a tariff war is reckless enough.

In regard to its initiatives across all categories, the administration puts at risk its genuine accomplishments. Its delight in shock and awe feeds upon itself in complete disregard of history and without projecting forward in view of the relative powers it seeks to marshal against those of the world, the laws of economics, and the very weight of reality, all of which it seems to imagine it is somehow able to intimidate. The price will be steep.

I mean, the elections are over, yes, and (to a decreasing degree, as their legislative agenda gets passed), keeping Trump happy is important for Congressional Republicans, to be able to make use of the Republican trifecta.

But he’s generating a lot of friction in his coalition.

I can’t wait until he calls the Wall Street Journal some kind of radical left publication.

“It is the responsibility of the President of the United States to reassure the markets and Americans about their economic security in the face of nonstop media fearmongering,” wrote White House spokesman Kush Desai.

1. The administration states that it is going to take an action.

2. Media uncontroversially points out that if the administration does what has said it will do, it is going to create a problem.

3. The administration cancels the action.

4. The administration asserts that media has created a problem by pointing out said problem.

It’s just nonstop.

EDIT: Also, it doesn’t sound like Trump is saying “buy stock in general”, but “buy stock in my overpriced social media company (DJT)” which isn’t even going to be a particularly good example of a company especially impacted by tariffs.

I’m generally fine with removing water efficiency regulations. The government should be internalizing any externalities associated with water availability via the price of water, anyway, not mandating specific solutions, and if you do that then you’ve solved the problem. If people want to pay what it costs to obtain water for some use, that’s fine in my book, and that solves the problem, lets them incorporate their values. If you don’t want to be paying high water bills, then get water-efficient appliances. If you want to pay the cost of obtaining extra water because you want a longer shower or a lawn or a pool or whatever, knock yourself out. I’m fine with the government mandating water-efficiency labeling, so that people can make informed comparisons about how much a shower head or toilet or whatever uses, but it should be individuals making the value calls on where they want water usage to be.

There are cases where there are legitimate emergencies, where the market has no time to respond, and you have to ration a good. Say that, oh, there’s a dam failure. Okay, sure. Then having regulations that restrict any non-essential water use is fine. But that’s a different scenario from the long-run stuff associated with water use efficiency on appliances.

If you aren’t internalizing costs associated with water consumption into the price of water, then it’s not just that you aren’t just incorporating end-user usage preferences, you’re opening yourself to problems where people inefficiently use the limited resource in some other way that you haven’t accounted for.

Given time, you can get more water — it’s just a function of how expensive it is to obtain, purify, and transport.

• You can build more water transport infrastructure – California moves residential water across the whole state; it has rainforest in the north and desert in the south.

• You can process sewage and recover water from that, make your water system a closed loop.

• In many places, you can desalinate water from the ocean — San Diego, which is in the coastal desert, buys desalinated water for $3,400 per acre foot as of 2024 – and California has fairly expensive electricity as the US goes, which is a major input there. Looking online, depending upon water usage, a typical household might use somewhere between 1 and 0.25 acre-feet per year.