Daily-Dose

Contents

• From New Yorker
• From Vox
• From The Hindu: Sports
• From The Hindu: National News
• From BBC: Europe
• From Ars Technica
• From Jokes Subreddit

From New Yorker

• Nikki Haley Seeks an Iowa Surge as the Last G.O.P. Moderate in the Race - In the final run-up to the Iowa caucuses, Haley made her closing argument to the state’s voters, pitching herself as the anti-chaos, anti-Trump candidate. - link

• The U.S. Is Reaping the Benefits of Low Unemployment - In many ways, keeping the jobless rate low and the labor markets tight is the most effective and cost-efficient welfare policy there is. - link

• What Could Tip the Balance in the War in Ukraine? - In 2024, the most decisive fight may also be the least visible: Russia and Ukraine will spend the next twelve months in a race to reconstitute and resupply their forces. - link

• The Last Gasp of the Iowa Kingmakers - A group of local influencers, who have held sway in past caucuses, recently gathered to try to derail Donald Trump’s candidacy. Will their effort make any difference? - link

• How Trump Captured Iowa’s Religious Right - The state’s evangelical voters were once skeptical of the former President. Now they are among his strongest supporters. - link

From Vox

• How a horny beer calendar sparked a conservative civil war -

  

  It’s called “Calendargate,” and it’s raising the question of what — and whom — the right-wing war on “wokeness” is really for.

  While most people were enjoying the holidays, extremely online conservatives were fighting about a pinup calendar.

  Last month, Ultra Right Beer — a company founded as a conservative alternative to allegedly woke Bud Light — released a 2024 calendar titled “Conservative Dad’s Real Women of America 2024 Calendar.” The calendar contains photos of “the most beautiful conservative women in America” in various sexy poses. Some, like anti-trans swimmer Riley Gaines and writer Ashley St. Clair, are wearing revealing outfits; others, like former House candidate Kim Klacik, are fully clothed. No one is naked.

  But this mild sexiness was just a bit too much for some prominent social conservatives, who started decrying the calendar in late December as (among other things) “demonic.” The basic complaint is that the calendar is pandering to married men’s sinful lust, debasing conservative women, and making conservatives seem like hypocrites when they complain about leftist immorality.

  “This is the problem with conservatives who think they can act just like the secular world,” writes Jenna Ellis, one of Donald Trump’s attorneys during the 2020 election fight. “If conservatives aren’t morally grounded Christians, what are we even ‘conserving’?”

  Other conservatives, led by several of the women who posed in the calendar, defended the calendar — decrying their critics as nosy puritans who exemplify the right’s inability to connect with ordinary people.

  The fight between these factions, dubbed “Calendargate,” started on X but has exploded outward — becoming an inescapable topic on the right in the new year. Prominent right-wing media figures like Tim Pool and Megyn Kelly have weighed in; articles dissecting the controversy have appeared in National Review and the American Conservative.

  On one level, this is all very stupid. No one is going to be hurt by the calendar, nor will the controversy surrounding it change anything of political significance. These is an obvious fact that some of the Calendargate participants themselves acknowledge.

  At the same time, Calendargate is deeply revealing about the fault lines inside the conservative movement.

  Broadly speaking, the Trump-era conservative movement has involved an alliance between traditional social conservatives and so-called “Barstool conservatives”: leave-me-alone bros who resent what they see as censorious political correctness. These two factions are aligned on the need to fight the left, but deeply at odds on social policy questions ranging from abortion to pornography.

  Calendargate raises the question of what the war on “wokeness” is for: freeing conservatives to have raunchy fun without fear of left-wing censorship, or imposing a new vision of right-wing virtue in place of the reining liberal cultural ethos?

  How the right’s ideologues end up answering that question could well shape the future of the Republican Party.

  The conservative divide at the heart of Calendargate

  The idea of an “alternative” set of conservative goods is not a new one. From evangelical film studios to right-wing literary imprints to borderline scammy survival kits, there’s a long and storied history of products being marketed specifically to conservatives as counterweight to what they see as the unacceptably liberal mainstream.

  Such cultural and economic counterprogramming has become particularly important in the last few years, as conservatives have increasingly come to see big business as an enemy stronghold. The rise of conservative corporate boycotts in 2023 speaks to just how alienated many on the right feel from mainstream American consumer society.

  Ultra Right Beer and companies like it have sprung up to sell to this market. The company was founded in the midst of the great Bud Light controversy — when conservatives swore off the beer brand in response to its advertising partnership with trans influencer Dylan Mulvaney. The calendar’s explicitly transphobic emphasis on “real” women in the calendar is a callback to these origins.

  All sorts of conservatives jumped on board the anti-Bud Light train, leading to a large and seemingly sustained drop in beer’s sales. But that doesn’t mean Ultra Right was poised for success. Setting aside the question of whether the beer is good — I haven’t had the pleasure — there’s also a question of what kinds of conservatives you expect to buy your beer. Judging from the calendar, Ultra Right’s founders have a specific demo in mind: the “Barstool Conservative.”

  The term, coined by writer Matthew Walther in 2021, refers to the popular male-oriented Barstool Sports media empire owned by a pushing-50 bro named Dave Portnoy. Barstool has a well-deserved reputation for catering to the lowest common male denominator: The “pics” section of the site features a running feature from its Chicago affiliate titled “smokeshow of the week.”

  Barstool conservatives are the sort of people (okay, mostly men) who like Barstool’s vibe. They are the kind of dudes angry that Sports Illustrated’s swimsuit magazine now features photos of older, plus-size, and trans models. They tend to dislike liberals, specifically the kind of liberal who would chide them for objectifying women or laughing at a racist joke. They tend to see Trump’s history of womanizing and conspicuous consumption not as turnoffs but as selling points.

  But while part of the post-Trump right-wing coalition, they are very different from traditional social conservatives. They don’t see a society with widespread porn access and legalized weed as a problem; they see it as progress. Christian sexual morality holds less than zero appeal to them; they might even support same-sex marriage or (like Portnoy himself) legalized abortion.

  So while both Barstool and social conservatives groups might be comfortable voting for Trump and his fellow Republicans to fight against “wokeness,” they have wildly different views of what an ideal society might look like — including the kinds of cultural products they want to consume. In essence, it’s a question about what should be conserved.

  “Either the sexual revolution was fun and games until a bunch of overzealous feminists and LGBT activists ruined it, or the sexual revolution was doomed from the start and the ’90s-style smut found in advertising, movies, and calendars isn’t much removed from our present degradation,” National Review’s Madeline Kearns writes in her piece on Calendargate. For her part, Kearns argues for the latter:

  What needs conserving is not the liberalism of yesterday but timeless virtues and norms: a courtship culture, one that emphasizes male and female sexual complementarity, abstinence before marriage, fidelity within it, openness to the gift of children, as well as the cultivation of a culture in which beauty is prized over the vulgar and obscene. Lust, however lucrative, undermines this project.

  The gulf between this social conservatism and the quasi-libertarianism of Barstool types creates a huge problem for companies looking to sell their products to “conservatives” as a bloc. “Sex sells” is generally a pretty good rule when you’re selling to Barstool conservatives, but it might lose you fans among the pious evangelical crowd.

  Ultra Right’s calendar ran headfirst into this problem, and an absurd internet controversy was the result.

  Whither the “anti-woke”?

  Much like conservative-focused brands, the Barstool-versus-social-cons fight is hardly new.

  In a 2023 column, the New York Times’s Jane Coaston traced it back to a debate between William F. Buckley, the patron saint of movement conservatism, and Hugh Hefner, the founder of Playboy magazine. In 1966, Hefner appeared on Buckley’s television show Firing Line to defend a political doctrine he defined as “anti-puritanism” — the idea that “man’s morality, like his religion, is a personal affair best left to his own conscience.”

  In Coaston’s view, the conservative movement’s increasing reliance on Barstool types is a sign that Hefner has been winning the debate. “There’s been a subtle warping of the conservative movement as it sounds increasingly less like itself and more like its horny, libertine opposition, in the pursuit of electoral gains and cultural relevance,” she writes.

  At the same time, there’s been some movement in the precise opposite direction. A new generation of “postliberal” Republicans — like Sens. J.D. Vance and Josh Hawley — want to not merely defend traditional social norms but use political power more aggressively to impose them on the rest of America. Vance has, for example, called for outright banning pornography (in defiance of clear First Amendment jurisprudence).

  These postliberals are reacting to the same thing that the Barstool conservatives are: a sense that liberal social ideas have come to dominate American politics and culture. But they disagree profoundly on why that’s bad: The Barstool conservatives hate “wokeness” for restricting liberty, while postliberals think the problem is that liberalism restricts freedom for the wrong reasons and in the wrong ways.

  The two strains of conservatism are different not just substantively, but sociologically.

  Postliberalism is a highly intellectualized elite movement, popular among Catholic college professors and Ivy-educated senators. It was born out of a sense that traditional social conservatives, the kinds of people who objected to the Ultra Right calendar, were insufficiently ruthless in wielding power to crush their cultural enemies.

  Barstool conservatism, by contrast, is a politics of the gut (Coaston calls it a “conservatism of feels”). There are no intellectuals avatars, worked-out doctrines, or glitzy conferences; it’s not really a “movement” in any organized fashion. It’s just an inchoate sense, seemingly widely shared among the current GOP electorate, that the woke are trampling on their freedom to speak their mind and have fun.

  It makes sense, then, that this movement has more influence in conservative countercultural institutions than its more elitist postliberal rival.

  The guy behind Ultra Right Beer, who goes by the pseudonym “Conservative Dad,” isn’t out there to advance Catholic integralism. He wants to make money by appealing to the sense among conservatives that political correctness has gone too far — and what better way to do that than by appealing to men who pine for the days when you could ogle “real women” in the workplace?

  The logic of the market is not the logic of the postliberal intellectual, or even the traditional social conservative. As conservatives become increasingly frustrated with mainstream corporations, there will be demand for something other than schlocky films about the end of days. And what the people want now isn’t, for the most, part, what social conservatives want them to want.

  This isn’t lost on postliberals. Writing on Calendargate in the American Conservative, former Ron DeSantis speechwriter Nate Hochman bemoans the way that so-called conservative brands play into mainstream culture rather than challenging its premises. “The narrow ideological frame that the right operates in permits only a long, unending line of ‘conservative alternatives to [X],’ reproducing the values and animating assumptions of the dominant culture with a thin coat of right-wing policy priorities painted on top,” he argues. “An anti-trans Bud Light is still, in essence, Bud Light. An anti-woke Playboy is still, in essence, Playboy.”

  This, more than anything else, is what makes Calendargate worthy of notice. While an essentially ridiculous controversy pitting a series of too-online conservatives against each other, it exposes the ways in which the attempts to remake conservatism in the “anti-woke” era will create new sources of tension inside the conservative camp — and highlights the way this struggle might play out inside conservative cultural spaces.

• Nikki Haley, the one candidate who could still make the GOP primary kinda interesting, explained -

  

  How Haley is trying to reject — and co-opt — Trumpism.

  Donald Trump leads polls overwhelmingly, Ron DeSantis has gone down in flames, and various other candidates never got off the ground.

  But if the GOP presidential primary is to be a serious contest at all — and it’s not yet clear if it is — it’s Nikki Haley who will make it one.

  Trump remains the overwhelming favorite to win, with large leads in every early state and positively gigantic leads in national polls.

  But Haley has been creeping up in New Hampshire. Recent polls are mixed on just how close she’s come to Trump — one shows her trailing the former president by just 7 points, while another shows her down 20 points. But she has millions in outside spending lined up to try to make that contest, set for January 23, closer.

  Haley is better-positioned than many expect to have a “moment” in the nomination battle, should she do well in New Hampshire. But it’s still very hard to imagine how she could actually defeat Trump. Only if you squint, and make some very optimistic assumptions for her, you could maybe — maybe — see it.

  In a field full of also-rans and laughingstocks, though, Haley has ended up being the one Trump challenger who still looks the teensiest bit dangerous as 2024 begins. And the more you know about her political history, the less surprising that is.

  Who is Nikki Haley, and how did she rise in politics?

  Born to Punjabi Sikh immigrants who’d settled in South Carolina, Haley was born Nimarata Nikki Randhawa. She speaks and writes often about the awkwardness of growing up as one of very few kids who were neither white nor Black in her area at a time when South Carolina life was thoroughly organized around that racial binary. But the accusation that she changed her name in some phony Anglicizing fashion, long spread by her political rivals, is false: she’s gone by Nikki since she was born.

  Thank you for the question. Nikki is a Punjabi word that means little one. It’s my middle name on my birth certificate.
  
  As someone who also doesn’t go by their first name, I’m sure you understand. https://t.co/xwEWhyhnnF

  — Nikki Haley (@NikkiHaley) April 30, 2021

While attending Clemson University, Nikki began dating her future husband, Bill Haley, but decided she preferred to call him by his middle name, “Michael” instead. She got others to do the same, and the rebranding stuck. She graduated with an accounting degree, and within a few years, she had married and was working on the business side of a women’s clothing company her mother had started. She got involved in local business and women-in-business groups.

Eventually, in 2004, the 31-year-old Haley turned her eye to politics. She decided to run for the state legislature, primarying a Republican incumbent who’d held the seat for three decades — and, surprisingly, won. In the ensuing years, she at first seemed to be climbing the ladder in the statehouse. But the GOP speaker was locked in frequent combat with the state’s governor, Mark Sanford (R), who wanted bigger spending cuts and conservative policy overhauls. Haley cast her lot with Sanford and became a critic of the speaker, who iced her out of committee posts, throwing her political future into question.

So in 2009, as a still-little-known state legislator, Haley entered the race to succeed the term-limited Sanford the following year. Three more established white men were already running — the attorney general, lieutenant governor, and a Congress member — but Haley was counting on a big advantage: The popular Sanford had privately encouraged her to run and, she thought, he’d be in her corner. Yet just one month after Haley entered the race, Sanford imploded in scandal (he vanished from the state for six days to conduct an affair in Buenos Aires, with his spokesperson infamously claiming he was hiking the Appalachian Trail). She spent most of the race in fourth place in the polls.

Chris Keane/Getty Images

But 2010 was the Tea Party year, and Haley played its politics expertly, winning out-of-state endorsements from both Mitt Romney and Sarah Palin, hammering one opponent’s vote for the bank bailout, and branding herself as a different kind of conservative opposed to the corrupt establishment. Then she deftly handled late-breaking claims from two South Carolina GOP operatives that they’d had affairs with her; she denounced their allegations as dirty smear politics, and they never came up with proof. Her support only rose, and she won the primary big (though her first general election win was closer than expected).

Haley’s governorship had its fair share of tumult and scandals, but politically, it was a success for her. She tacked conservative on some issues, for instance, turning down Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion, and eventually avoided a repeat of her bitter primary. But she also won broad popularity by focusing on jobs, helping incentivize Boeing to bring more jobs to the (anti-union) state, and winning her 2014 reelection easily while the state’s economy thrived.

Then, after the 2015 Charleston church shooting, when it emerged that the gunman had frequently displayed the Confederate flag, Haley at long last got the flag taken down from the statehouse grounds, winning national attention. The press deemed her a rising star; she criticized Trump during the 2016 primary and endorsed Sen. Marco Rubio (some speculated about a Rubio-Haley ticket).

Aaron P. Bernstein/Getty Images

Instead, Trump won. Like most in the GOP, Haley had accommodated herself to his rise and endorsed him, but it was still somewhat surprising when Trump picked her as ambassador to the United Nations, especially since she lacked any foreign policy experience. In her two years in the New York-based post, she talked tough on TV a lot (including about Russia), staunchly supported Israel, and made contacts without needing to be in Washington or run an agency. Persistent rumors claimed that Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump recommended Trump drop Mike Pence from the 2020 ticket in favor of Haley to appeal to suburban women.

That didn’t happen, so after stepping down from government at the end of 2018, Haley set about making money, through speaking fees, consulting, book deals, and board seats (including at Boeing, though Haley hastily quit that post after the company considered taking pandemic aid, with the politics of bailouts likely on her mind).

When the next presidential cycle came around, Trump’s presence in the race didn’t deter her from launching another underdog campaign. And, unlike DeSantis, her support has gradually improved rather than declining. In part, that’s because of her charisma, demonstrated in feisty debate performances in which she’s sparred with her male rivals. But unlike DeSantis, who unsuccessfully tried to outflank Trump from the right, Haley pursued a different strategy based on appealing to more traditional Republican voters.

What does Nikki Haley actually stand for?

On the issues, Haley is a relatively standard early 2010s Republican who has done little to alter her ideology for the Trump era — indeed, that’s her appeal to many of her backers, that she’s essentially a return to how the GOP used to be.

Generally, she’s pro-business and culturally conservative. She says she’ll cut a lot of taxes and slash government spending, and bragged about being a “union buster.” She says she’s “pro-life” but wants to reassure swing voters that she won’t push hugely restrictive policies. She’s complained about trans women and girls competing in girls’ sports, calling it “the women’s issue of our time.” She wants to crack down on illegal immigration but supports “merit-based” immigration.

But Haley stands out for rejecting the Trumpian turn on two major issues.

The first is on entitlement spending. Haley harks back to the era of Paul Ryan in arguing that cuts to Social Security and Medicare are urgently necessary, though she stresses such changes should only affect younger people and not current beneficiaries. This position helped earn Haley the endorsement of billionaire Charles Koch’s political network but would open her up to attacks in the general election. (Trump stood out among Republicans in 2016 for pledging not to touch Social Security or Medicare, but toward the end of his term he said he’d look at changing the programs “at the right time.”)

Dominick Reuter/AFP via Getty Images

The second is foreign policy, where Haley sounds like a traditional Republican interventionist hawk. Trump has mused about pulling the US out of NATO, wants to withdraw more troops currently deployed in countries like South Korea, and has refused to commit to aiding Ukraine in its war against Russia. But Haley has championed Ukraine’s cause, said further aid is necessary to counter Russia and China, and wants to admit Ukraine to NATO (even President Biden says now is not the time for that).

One issue on which Haley has not stuck out her neck, though, is Trump’s efforts to steal the 2020 election. She followed a typical mainstream Republican path by criticizing Trump in the days just after the January 6 attack but pivoting within weeks to oppose Trump’s impeachment trial. (“Give the man a break. I mean, move on.”) She’s opposed the prosecutions of Trump and said she’d pardon him if he’s convicted. She’s clearly seen no political benefit in becoming a loud or consistent Trump critic, and has avoided doing so, for now.

Okay, does Nikki Haley actually have a chance of winning?

It is easy to see how Haley could have a moment during the early states. It still seems much more difficult to envision her actually beating Donald Trump in 2024.

Let’s start with how she could win. Expectations for her are very low in Iowa on January 15, so even a decent performance there would be covered as a victory by the media.

Next is New Hampshire on January 23. One poll released this week was very encouraging for Haley, showing Trump at 39 percent and Haley at 32 percent. Another poll was less encouraging — it showed Trump at 46 percent and Haley at 26 percent. In both, Chris Christie got 12 percent of the vote.

Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

Still, Haley has lots of outside money trying to improve her numbers further with ads. She also has the endorsement of the state’s governor, Chris Sununu, who has urged Christie to quit the race and endorse Haley. Additionally, Haley could get a boost from independents or even Democrats, who are permitted to vote in the Granite State GOP primary.

Some past primary frontrunners have seen their national leads suddenly evaporate based on early state results; a Haley victory in New Hampshire would surely give the race a jolt and could puncture the belief that Trump is inevitable. The purported next state for Republicans is Nevada in early February, but there’s a weird situation in that state where Trump and Haley are competing in separate contests on different days (long story). So the real next showdown would be South Carolina, Haley’s home state, on February 24. A further win there would set her up very nicely for Super Tuesday on March 5, and the battle would continue from there.

But there are many reasons to be deeply skeptical that this will happen. Trump is leading national polls by 50 points, and no one with such a lead at this point has ever lost a presidential primary. A national Haley surge relies on the idea that Trump’s support will suddenly collapse, when the closest thing to an iron law of Republican politics in the past decade has been the GOP base’s refusal to ditch Trump. Haley isn’t even currently favored to win South Carolina — she’s trailing Trump by about 30 points there in polls.

Haley also got a series of bad news cycles at just the wrong time for her, due to a very bad answer she gave at a town hall event. Asked what caused the Civil War, she gave a vague answer referring to “the role of government,” and avoided referring directly to slavery. After criticism, she said the next day that “of course the Civil War was about slavery,” but her rivals (including both Trump and Biden) seized on the comments to suggest she dodged the question.

But the biggest problem for Haley may be that she perfectly epitomizes what many Republican donors want for the party, and where many Republican voters in the early 2010s then thought they wanted — but not what the base in the Trump era actually wants. Which means she may well be facing the same limitation Rubio faced in 2016.

Olivier Douliery/AFP via Getty Images

If Haley falls short in the presidential contest, attention will quickly turn to whether Trump will pick her as his running mate. There’s been reporting that Trump wants a female running mate, with Haley often mentioned as an option. But she’d face some resistance from important members of Trump’s coalition. Donald Trump Jr. said recently that he would “go to great lengths to make sure” that his father didn’t pick Haley, calling her “a puppet of the establishment,” and Tucker Carlson has made similar comments.

Whatever Trump decides, 2028 would seemingly be an election in which Haley could run again without the big guy on the ballot — but let’s not get ahead of ourselves. New Hampshire still lies ahead, and that will determine whether Haley really will make this race somewhat interesting, or whether she will sputter out like all the other challengers to Trump before her.

• Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin’s mysterious absence, explained -

  

  Why it’s a big deal that the president didn’t know his defense secretary was in the hospital for three days.

  Even the most powerful people in the world are still humans with bodies and families. They sometimes need to take time off, whether for medical reasons, personal matters, or just to recharge. But the people who rely on them still need to know where they are.

  That’s the issue at hand with Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin’s days-long disappearance last week. The secretary was hospitalized and placed in intensive care on January 1, but the public wasn’t informed until three days later — and, even more surprisingly, neither was Austin’s ultimate boss, President Joe Biden.

  That’s a shockingly long time given Austin’s job as head of the $800 billion Defense Department, one whose command of the US military is second only to the president and who is sixth in line for presidential succession.

  “The secretary of defense plays a crucial role in the chain of command,” Peter Feaver, a Duke University professor and former White House National Security Council (NSC) staffer who studies civil-military relations, told Vox. “He’s the civilian in control of national security 24/7. That’s an important function in a republic. It’s important in the way that even some of the other Cabinet secretaries are not.”

  Austin, who the Pentagon finally said on Tuesday was admitted to the ICU for complications from prostate surgery treatment, is now back on the job, and for the moment the White House says it intends to keep him there. (Though NSC spokesperson John Kirby said Tuesday that the White House also did not know Austin had prostate cancer until this morning, a situation he termed “not optimal.”) But the press and members of Congress are continuing to demand answers, with some calling for Austin’s resignation.

  As it faces these questions, the administration is already stretched trying to manage American involvement in two raging wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, and is facing a tough reelection battle in the coming year. A centerpiece of Biden’s argument for reelection has been to contrast the professionalism and dependability of his team, particularly on national security, with the chaos of Donald Trump’s term in office.

  But it’s hard not to view the lack of communication around Austin’s absence as anything but chaotic, and this apparent national security own-goal could not have come at a worse time for the White House and the Pentagon.

  The silent general

  A retired four-star general, Austin has been secretary of defense since the beginning of Biden’s term. He had a distinguished military career that included combat commands in Iraq and Afghanistan and a three-year stint as commander of Central Command, overseeing US military activity in the Middle East and South Asia.

  Austin’s appointment made history, as he is the first Black secretary of defense. (Notably, while Black Americans are overrepresented in the military as a whole, they have been underrepresented in the senior ranks.) But it was also controversial because he had retired from active military service only five years earlier. Federal law prohibits military officers from becoming secretary of defense until seven years after they retire, unless granted a special waiver by Congress.

  Austin was only the third secretary to be granted such a waiver but was the second in less than five years after Trump’s first secretary of defense, former Marine Gen. James Mattis. This led to some criticism that Biden was following in the former president’s footsteps, further eroding a norm intended to maintain civilian control over the military.

  But Austin had had a close personal relationship with Biden. The president’s late son, Beau, served on Austin’s staff in Iraq. Still, while Austin frequently represents US policy on national security crises to both the media and foreign governments, he’s also known as a very private person — he was reportedly nicknamed “the silent general” in military circles — who shares little about his personal life with either friends or colleagues. And this desire for privacy is what may have gotten him into trouble.

  The SecDef vanishes

  The imbroglio began on December 22 when Austin underwent an elective medical procedure — later revealed to be treatment for prostate cancer — which required him to stay overnight at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center. On New Year’s Day, several hours after he took part in a conversation with Biden and other top national security officials about the Middle East, Austin began experiencing severe pain and was taken back to Walter Reed.

  The following day, Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr., chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the highest-ranking officer in the military, was told that Austin had been hospitalized; also informed were Austin’s chief of staff, Kelly Magsamen, and the Pentagon press secretary, Maj. Gen. Pat Ryder. Magsamen, who was sick with the flu, did not inform the White House.

  Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks, who was on vacation in Puerto Rico, was told to assume some secretary-level duties, but was not informed that Austin was hospitalized. (According to the Pentagon, it is not unusual for a deputy secretary to take over a secretary’s duties for a short period without knowing exactly why.)

  Both the White House and Hicks finally learned of Austin’s hospitalization on January 4. According to Ryder, Magsamen had been “unable to make notifications before then” because she was ill. Ryder briefed the press at the Pentagon that day, but did not disclose anything about Austin’s condition. The Pentagon finally informed Congress and the press on January 5 but did not publicize the details of Austin’s medical condition until January 9.

  Austin is still in the hospital, though no longer in the ICU, but has resumed his full duties according to the Pentagon. A statement from Walter Reed described his prognosis as “excellent.”

  Why Austin’s absence matters

  The most straightforward explanation for what happened is simple confusion resulting from the fact that Austin’s chief of staff was ill and his deputy was on vacation at the same time he was hospitalized.

  There does not appear to have been any direct impact on US national security or the military’s ability to carry out operations. In fact, the US carried out a rare airstrike in Baghdad, targeting an Iranian-linked militia leader, shortly before the White House learned of Austin’s condition on January 4. According to the Pentagon, the strike had been approved before his hospitalization.

  In fact, things seemed to carry on as normal to such an extent that it raises a few questions about just how important Austin is to the administration. “The fact that Biden hadn’t been in touch with his secretary of defense for four days during a period of round-the-clock military operations and crisis … suggests that Austin is far from essential,” wrote Slate’s Fred Kaplan.

  As for the question of what would have happened if a more serious crisis had erupted last week, on paper at least, the chain of command was never broken. Military commanders or the White House could have reached Hicks, who had secure communications equipment with her on vacation and already knew she had to assume some of Austin’s duties, even if she didn’t know exactly why she was filling in.

  Some lawmakers, such as Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR), have suggested that Austin is a “key link” in the nuclear chain of command, implying that the president would not be able to order the use of nuclear weapons with him. But this is not correct. For better or for worse, the president has the sole authority to order the use of nuclear weapons, and if they chose to do so, they would communicate those orders directly to military officers at the Pentagon using codes unique to them. A 2022 Congressional Research Service report noted that the “Secretary of Defense would possibly contribute to the process by confirming that the order came from the President, but this role could also be filled by an officer in the National Military Command Center at the Pentagon.”

  But all of this assumes that backup systems and redundancies are working perfectly, which they clearly weren’t for the three days when the president didn’t know his secretary of defense was in the hospital.

  Duke’s Feaver also brought up a hypothetical scenario in which the president wanted to call off a strike, such as the January 4 one in Baghdad. In a situation like that, they would likely inform their national security adviser — Jake Sullivan, in Biden’s case — who would communicate with the defense secretary: “So, it’s New Year’s Day, the president changes his mind and decides to cancel it. Jake tried to call the Defense Secretary and says, ‘Wait, he’s in intensive care? Why didn’t anyone tell me?’ It wouldn’t prevent the president from executing the order, but there would have been a hiccup at a moment of very high tension.”

  This is not an outlandish scenario. In 2019, Trump reportedly told the Pentagon to call off airstrikes on Iran with planes already in the air.

  Kori Schake, a former White House and Defense Department staffer now at the American Enterprise Institute, said another concerning scenario from the point of view of civilian control of the military is one in which the president could not reach the defense secretary, their deputy, or their chief of staff (all of whom were to varying degrees of out of pocket last week). In that case, the president would likely contact the chairman of the Joint Chiefs directly to implement their orders. But the chairman, unlike the defense secretary, is a uniformed member of the military.

  “That removes the judgment of the civilian leadership of the department, which is really important,” Schake told Vox. “It’s the secretary of defense’s job to make sure that military plans, budgeting, and operations are consistent with the president’s political priorities. That’s why they’re a member of the Cabinet. That’s why Congress approves them.”

  Will Austin stay on the job?

  Back on the job, Austin now says he takes “full responsibility” for the decisions made last week, while the Pentagon has ordered a 30-day review of what went wrong.

  “The DOD is doing the classic move of stretching the timeline out and hoping this will die down,” said Schake. “They have some explaining to do. Not just how not to do this again, but why were specific decisions made?”

  The White House has said Austin will stay on the job and has the president’s full support. One official told Politico on Monday that the president would not accept the secretary’s resignation if he offered it. However, in the aftermath of the affair, the White House is ordering a review of Cabinet protocols for delegating authority, according to a memo obtained by ABC News.

  Jason Dempsey, a military veteran and former White House staffer who is now a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security, said the affair was “certainly a mistake” and should be a lesson for staffing practices going forward. He said Austin’s command background — the very thing that made his appointment somewhat controversial — also made it unlikely his reputation in the military ranks would be damaged.

  “He has a wellspring of reputation, and he’s going to get some grace from his military counterparts,” Dempsey said. “If this was some congressman who was walking into the building for the first time and did this, it would be different.”

  Republicans on Capitol Hill and the campaign trail are unlikely to be so forgiving. Cotton has already called for Austin’s resignation. Rep. Matt Rosendale of Montana says he’s planning to introduce articles of impeachment. Trump, who went through two confirmed defense secretaries and four acting ones during his four years in office, has called for Austin to be fired for “dereliction of duty.”

  “He will have to go before Congress and explain himself,” Feaver predicted. “And if the explanation is what I think it is, which is just that he was a very private person and he was embarrassed to be talking about [the issue], he’s going to have to get over that and talk about it in a highly publicized hearing where there are going to be people trying to score points off of him.”

  Dempsey said that the entire situation was somewhat ironic given the stress that Austin’s military training would have put on passing along all relevant information to his superiors: “The first thing they teach you in the military is that bad news doesn’t get better with age.”

From The Hindu: Sports

• Something Royal, Supreme Dance, Schnell and Starkova excel -

• Julio, Knotty Charmer, Philosophy, Ruling Dynasty, King Of War and Gismo impress -

• Enabler, The Godfather and Running Star show out -

• Vishnu Vinod makes a strong statement on his return -

• Morning Digest | Boeing 737 MAX of Indian airline had a missing part; Study finds majority of Indian cities far from clean air target, and more - Here is a select list of stories to start the day

From The Hindu: National News

• Last date extended till Jan. 17 for submission of applications for APPSC Group-II services -

• Dukanwadi residents in Yadgir demand drinking water supply -

• Congress alone can safeguard interests of Andhra Pradesh, says AICC State in-charge Manickam Tagore - Manickam Tagore, while addressing the Congress executive meeting on poll preparedness, accuses TDP, YSRCP and JSP of toeing the BJP line

• Here are the big stories from Karnataka today - Welcome to the Karnataka Today newsletter, your guide from The Hindu on the major news stories to follow today. Curated and written by Nalme Nachiyar.

• Legendary singer K.J. Yesudas turns 84 - Newspapers bring out special pages with feature stories and picture albums of him as a mark of tribute, television channels air special programmes and interviews featuring his fellow singers and music directors, who reminisce about their experiences with him

From BBC: Europe

• Polish police arrest MPs in presidential palace - Mariusz Kaminski and Maciej Wasik were sentenced to two years in prison for abuse of power.

• Serbian rescue for livestock trapped on island in Danube - One local farmer says some animals have already died after freezing temperatures set in this week.

• Gabriel Attal: Macron’s pick for PM is France’s youngest at 34 - Gabriel Attal is named France’s next prime minister, as Emmanuel Macron aims to revive his presidency.

• Italian fascist salute images spark political uproar - The crowd was taking part in an annual event marking the killing of far-right activists in the 1970s.

• Austrian ski gondola crashes in Hochoetz injuring Danish family - The gondola is said to have fallen 7m (23ft) at the Hochoetz ski resort in Tyrol.

From Ars Technica

• Ars readers gave nearly $40,000 in our 2023 Charity Drive - Ars’ total charity haul since 2007 now tops $506,000. - link

• Facebook, Instagram block teens from sensitive content, even from friends - Meta hiding harmful content from teens isn’t enough, whistleblower says. - link

• Canada vows to defend its drug supply against Florida importation plan - Canada adds that importing its drugs will not solve America’s drug pricing problems. - link

• Quantum computing startup says it will beat IBM to error correction - Company builds on recent demonstration of error-tracking in similar hardware. - link

• Full trailer for 3 Body Problem captures epic scope of Liu Cixin’s novel - “They are coming. And there’s nothing you can do to stop them.” - link

From Jokes Subreddit

• A married couple became famous for not having an argument in 25 years. -

  Local newspaper editors gathered at the occasion to find out the secret to their happy 25 year marriage.

  The editor said: “Sir, it’s amazing, impossible. How is this possible?”

  The husband began recalling his honeymoon days: “after our honeymoon, we began horseback riding, on different horses. I was lucky to have a gentle, kind-spirited horse.

  My wife on the other hand wasn’t so fortunate. She had a crazy horse. As she was riding the horse, the horse began to jump wildly and she fell off. My wife patted the horse on the back, saying ‘this is your first time.’ She jumped back on and we continued riding for a while. Then the horse started acting wildly again, causing my wife to fall off once again. She didn’t lose her cool and patted the horse again, saying ‘this is your second time’. Once again she hopped on and again, the horse jumped wildly and she fell off. My wife pulled out a revolver and shot the horse dead.

  My jaw fell to the ground. ‘What the hell are you doing? Did you just shoot a horse?? What’s wrong with you?!’, I asked her, shocked and bewildered.

  She looked at me, ‘this is your first time’.”

  submitted by /u/hearsdemons
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• A driver was pulled over for speeding -

  The cop approaches and says, “Do you know how fast you were going?”

  The driver replies, “Yeah yeah, make it quick; I just robbed a bank and I just lost those cops a few miles back.”

  “Really?” as the cop starts taking notes, “All by yourself?”

  “Nah, I had a partner but I shot him! He’s in the trunk; I also have to smuggle the 20kg of cocaine next to him soon, so can you just please hurry up?”

  “Yah, I’m calling for backup”

  The cop takes the driver’s keys and puts him in handcuffs; 10 minutes later, two squad cars each with a pair of officers arrive and inspect the man’s vehicle. They kept looking and looking, but they can’t find the money, corpse, nor the cocaine.

  One of the latter cops, the sergeant, goes to the driver to apologize.

  “I’m sorry to inconvenience you sir; but our man told us you robbed a bank, killed a man, and was about to smuggle coke.”

  “What?! I assure you that a God-fearing man like me will never do any abhorrent deed.”

  “Yes, our mistake.”

  “I bet that bastard also said I was speeding!”

  submitted by /u/EggYakult
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• A boy brought home his report card to show his parents how well he did in math class. -

  His report card showed a 90/100 for his math grade. His father was ecstatic, however his mother knew he was terrible at math and thus simply couldn’t believe he got a 90/100.

  She looked closely at the report card and noticed that the 9 and the 0 looked to have different handwriting styles. She immediately became suspicious. “Son, tell me, did you add a 0 to the end of your grade?”

  “No,” the boy replied.

  “I’m going to ask you again,” said the mom, “did you add the 0 yourself?”

  “No mom, I didn’t add the 0–”

  Fuming, the mom cuts him off. “Ok, since you’re not telling me the truth, you are grounded for one month.”

  “No mom, please!” the boy begged, “I swear I didn’t add the 0!”

  “This is your last chance,” said the mom, “tell me the truth!”

  “I didn’t add the 0…I added the 9.”

  submitted by /u/Hipp013
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• A Zen Master taught two cows to be self aware. -

  A Zen Master taught two cows to be self aware. After a moment of confusion, they started to discuss this amongst themselves.
  The first one asked: “Do you think we have free will, or is the universe deterministic?”
  The second answered: “Moo.”

  submitted by /u/ExcArc
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• A little old lady of ninety goes to the doctor complaining of terrible flatulence. -

  She tells him she is otherwise in perfect health, but the constant wind is very uncomfortable. She adds, “But I’m so grateful that at least it isn’t embarassing. You see, the remarkable thing is, it’s always completely silent and it doesn’t smell at all. You would have no idea, but I’ve actually passed wind at least fifteen times just during this appointment.”

  The doctor agrees that is indeed remarkable, and he prescribes the old lady a course of tablets and tells her to come back the next week.

  When she returns, she isn’t happy. She tells the doctor that she doesn’t think the tablets he prescribed have done her any good at all. She still passes wind just as much, and although it is still completely silent, now it smells absolutely terrible.

  The doctor nods. “Excellent. Now we’ve cleared up your sinus problems, let’s see what we can do about your hearing.”

  submitted by /u/BeccasBump
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