Supreme Court Catching Flights Not Feelings

The Friday Post.

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“I wanna go missing!” - Associate Justice Samuel Alito singing along to “Cuff It.” (Photo: Alex Wong/Getty Images)

There is a certain phenomenon that I am interested in where there are some people who never seem to do any work. I don’t mean the Kim Kardashian way (she is currently crossing a picket line to work), the way she declared there are people deeply uninterested in hard work. I’m talking about something else, very sincerely: there are some people who just spend entire weeks producing nothing, making nothing, doing nothing, usually alongside people who are stressed and overworked and underpaid. Newsroom middle managers, studio executives, Hilaria Baldwin — they’re like the roommate that never does the dishes or takes out the trash. What a fascinating level of carelessness. I genuinely would love to know how they get it done. Republican justices on the Supreme Court have really cracked the code here: have you heard that all they’re doing is taking hoe trips?

Where in the world is Justice Samuel Alito Sandiego? On Tuesday, he published an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal preemptively responding to a Propublica report about luxury travel he took at the expense of the hedge fund billionaire (and Republican donor and man who happened to have business before the Supreme Court) Paul Singer. An editor's note explained that Propublica reporters sent Alito a series of questions on Friday and asked to respond by noon on Tuesday (a standard reporting practice); Alito instead sent his reply to the WSJ (childish). “ProPublica has leveled two charges against me: first, that I should have recused in matters in which an entity connected with Paul Singer was a party and, second, that I was obligated to list certain items as gifts on my 2008 Financial Disclose Report,” Alito wrote. “Neither charge is valid.” 

His response was meandering and sophomoric — he cited Webster’s Dictionary’s definitions of “hospitality” and “facility” to conclude that a PJ is a facility that was extended at the hospitality of someone who happened to be a person of billionaire experience. “As for the flight, Mr. Singer and others had already made arrangements to fly to Alaska when I was invited shortly before the event, and I was asked whether I would like to fly there in a seat that, as far as I am aware, would have otherwise been vacant,” he concluded, a reply just short of this is how bad bitches leave DC and go to Alaska … you bitches can’t even spell Alaska! (“We’re curious to know whether The Journal fact-checked the essay before publication,” Propublica’s editor in chief told the New York Times about Alito’s response.)

Days after Propublica’s report about the Singer-funded fishing trips, CNN confirmed that Alito took a trip to Rome paid for by the anti-choice activists at Notre Dame’s Religious Liberty Initiative. “After the high court overturned Roe v. Wade last year, the group paid for Alito’s trip to Rome to deliver a keynote address at a gala hosted at a palace in the heart of the city. It was his first known public appearance after the decision,” CNN reported. “At the start of his speech, he thanked the group for the ‘warm hospitality’ it provided to him and his wife, which, he later said, included a stay at a hotel that ‘looks out over the Roman Forum.’”

In April, Propublica reported on previously unknown (and undisclosed) luxury trips Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas took with (and at the expense of) the billionaire Harlan Crow: “A public servant who has a salary of $285,000, [Thomas] has vacationed on Crow’s superyacht around the globe. He flies on Crow’s Bombardier Global 5000 jet. He has gone with Crow to the Bohemian Grove, the exclusive California all-male retreat, and to Crow’s sprawling ranch in East Texas,” Propublica reported. “And Thomas typically spends about a week every summer at Crow’s private resort in the Adirondacks.” (Harlan Crow … what a name …! A white Creflo Dollar, if you will, a name so cartoonishly villainous I wondered if it’s real.)

Supreme Court justices, like most other government employees mind you, are required to report gifts worth over $480. These justices are traveling more than Flat Stanley. They are logging more miles than Mary-Kate and Ashley. They are literally catching flights (private) not feelings (criticisms of their truly fascist unchecked power). They are traveling more than a damn Tyler, The Creator song: Destination: remote / We done been everywhere / The only place we ain’t traveled is time!

Resign Ugly: David Zaslav 
There is nothing more pathetic than this Hollywood Reporter piece about David Zaslav, the Warner Bros. Discovery chief: as Zaslav guts Turner Classic Movies, he insists on working from Jack Warner’s old desk and living in Bob Evans’ old mansion. “He’s always coveted this mogul life, and now he’s got it,” an executive summarized. “Some part of him probably knows it’s temporary, so he’s like, ‘Screw it, let them eat cake.”

But “them” in that sentence refers to who exactly? Certainly not the people who write or produce the work that has made Warner Bros. great, or the people at TCM who have helped to preserve the history of that work. It is, instead, that obnoxious Cannes party and redesigning the WB commissary in Burbank.

A particularly lovely reflection, fromTy Burr :

This was good! This still matters! This is where you came from! Exactly that. Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, and Paul Thomas Anderson set an emergency call with Zaslav to ensure TCM’s future, but Oprah said that Maya Angelou said “When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.” Zaslav is not a man who cares about movies, he is a man who cares about throwing parties with Graydon Carter like um just go do that??

This is so Lady Gaga Investigating the Insurrection-coded

Truly — and I mean seriously — there is only one man on earth who’s got that dog in him and it’s James Cameron.

Gossip Time has an amazing rundown of the conscious uncoupling between Spotify and Harry/Meghan’s Archewell audio. I want to root for them but they genuinely seem exhausting. $20 Million dollars for one season of one podcast … You can read the Gossip Time post here.

There are good ships and wood ships, ships that sail the sea, but the best ships ...
Are friendships! Leonardo DiCaprio and Tobey Maguire, social chair and treasurer of the Wolf Pack (née Pussy Posse), debuted matching necklaces this week. 

Speaking of friendships … don’t gate keep Hung Up from your friends … you can use this newsletter’s new referral feature now :) 

And with that, a moment of silence for my personal favorite member of the Pussy Posse — biased because he is the only one who has addressed me directly. Lukas Haas better have a necklace hanging around his neck too.

I am still counting down the days to Barbenheimer day on July 21st, but until then: Nicki Minaj and Ice Spice released their Barbie movie collab. The song is fine, but the most amusing part about all of this is imagining Nicki on a Zoom with Greta Gerwig.

That’s all this week! Thank you for reading. This weekend I’m in Jackson Maine Wyoming and watching The Bear season two.