Big process news: White House Communications Director Anita Dunn is resigning. Deputy Dan Pfeiffer will take over. This is not a rebuke for Dunn; she made it clear from the get-go that her job was a temporary one. From Politico:

Anita Dunn is stepping down from her post as White House communications director, and her deputy, Dan Pfeiffer, will be replacing her, a White House official confirmed Tuesday.

Dunn took the job on an interim basis about six months ago after the first person Obama named to the key post, former Emily's List director Ellen Moran, left the post for the Commerce Department, citing family reasons.

Dunn, a longtime Democratic political consultant, made few headlines in the White House until last month when she seemed to kick off a crusade aimed at de-legitimizing Fox News. The anti-Fox campaign generated criticism from other members of the press as well as a lot of second-guessing from other Democratic strategists, some of whom described it as an unnecessary distraction.

I think this is a good thing. I despise Fox News (except for Shepard Smith) and think the White House should more or less ignore it, and it was right to push back a little when the rest of the MSM began following Fox's lead on stories like ACORN and Van Jones, but there came a point when Dunn and her team just went too far. Fox needs to be slapped, but you don't want that fight to overshadow the rest of your message as was always clear would happen. Besides, Saturday Night Live and Jon Stewart can handle much of that battle on their own. No, what the White House communications staff needs to do is focus more on crafting a presidential narrative rather than on one media outlet. As Tom Friedman said earlier this month, Obama's otherwise masterful speeches have "not tied all his programs into a single narrative that shows the links between his health care, banking, economic, climate, energy, education and foreign policies. Such a narrative would enable each issue and each constituency to reinforce the other and evoke the kind of popular excitement that got him elected."

Perhaps a new communications shop will help achieve that goal. Dunn, of course, wouldn't have deserved to be fired, and I wouldn't have called for her ouster over such small things, but this is the perfect time for a planned voluntary shake-up. Best wishes to Dunn in whatever comes next, and high expectations for Pfeiffer.

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It does not get much more humble than a safety match, but through its history the forces at work in globalization are rather clearly demonstrated. The world's match industry dates to the nineteenth century. In 1827, the friction match was invented by a British chemist John Walker using potassium chlorate and antimony sulfide on the burner side.  In 1844, two brothers in Sweden, Johan Edvard Lundstrom and Carl Frans Lundstrom, established a match factory in Jonkoping to manufacture lucifer matches. The lucifer match had a fatal flaw however, it ignited too easily but in 1855, Johan Edvard Lundstrom invented the Swedish-style safety match, the same match that we use now, by separating the combustible ingredients between the match stick head and the striking surface using newly discovered red phosphorus. For most of the rest of the nineteenth century, Sweden and then Japan (Makoto Shimizu went to Sweden in 1879 and brought back the technology) would dominate the global trade in matches but even so the world's match industry through 1914 is best described as autarkic. Local demand was largely met by local manufacturing.

As a result of severe competition prior to the First World War, the Swedish match industry underwent consolidation from 20 to two companies. One of these two surviving companies, Aktiebolaget Förenade Tändsticksfabriker (Förenade), was led by Ivar Kreuger. Between 1913 and 1932, Ivar Kreuger, who came to be known as the "Swedish Match King," would turn his small, family-owned match business into a $600 million global match empire. By 1917, Kreuger formed the Svenska Tändsticks Aktiebolaget, or in English, the Swedish Match AB (the company formally changed its name to the English version in 1980).

Despite the economic upheavals and political disruptions of the interwar period, Swedish Match had manufacturing operations in 36 countries including monopolies in 16 countries controlling nearly 60% of the world's match production. Kreuger's companies lent over $300 million dollars to governments in Europe, Latin America, and Asia in exchange for national match monopolies. Relying on international capital markets to finance acquisitions and to secure monopoly deals, by 1929 the stocks and bonds of Kreuger match companies were the most widely held securities in the world, including the most widely held in the US. When Kreuger committed suicide in 1932, forensic auditors discovered that Kreuger had operated a giant pyramid scheme, commonly called Ponzi schemes. His accounts were ridden "with fictitious assets, the truth hidden in a maze of over 400 subsidiary companies". Swedish Match's deficits exceeded Sweden's national debt. Funny how things just don't change though Bernard Madoff is sadly still alive.

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As far as I'm concerned, anything Nick Kristof writes is required reading. I can hardly say the same for the increasingly self-important Thomas "Six Months" Friedman, but today's column reminds us how he got his cushy gig in the first place.

Kristof's "A Prison of Shame, and It's Ours" chronicles the stories of several innocent people locked up in Guantanamo Bay, providing a compelling argument for why we need to close the place yesterday:

Mahvish Rukhsana Khan, an American woman of Afghan descent who worked as an interpreter, has written a book to be published next month, "My Guantánamo Diary," that is wrenching to read. She describes a pediatrician who returned to Afghanistan in 2003 to help rebuild his country -- and was then arrested by Americans, beaten, doused with icy water and paraded around naked. Finally, after three years, officials apparently decided he was innocent and sent him home...

The new material suggests two essential truths about Guantánamo:

First, most of the inmates were probably innocent all along, but Pakistanis or Afghans turned them over to America in exchange for large cash rewards. The moment we offered $25,000 rewards for Al Qaeda supporters, any Arab in the region risked being kidnapped and turned over as a terrorism suspect.

Second, torture was routine, especially early on. That's why more than 100 prisoners have died in American custody in Afghanistan, Iraq and Guantánamo...

When I started writing about Guantánamo several years ago, I thought the inmates might be lying and the Pentagon telling the truth. No doubt some inmates lie, and some surely are terrorists. But over time -- and it's painful to write this -- I've found the inmates to be more credible than American officials.

Both Condoleezza Rice and Robert Gates have pushed to shut down Guantánamo because it undermines America's standing and influence. They have been overruled by Dick Cheney and other hard-liners. In reality, it would take an exceptional enemy to damage America's image and interests as much as President Bush and Mr. Cheney already have with Guantánamo.

January 20 can't come soon enough. 261 days left...

In "Who Will Tell the People?", Friedman looks at America's crumbling power and economy, and suggests that it will take bold leadership and vision to restore us to our previous heights.

We are not as powerful as we used to be because over the past three decades, the Asian values of our parents' generation -- work hard, study, save, invest, live within your means -- have given way to subprime values: "You can have the American dream -- a house -- with no money down and no payments for two years."...

A few weeks ago, my wife and I flew from New York's Kennedy Airport to Singapore. In J.F.K.'s waiting lounge we could barely find a place to sit. Eighteen hours later, we landed at Singapore's ultramodern airport, with free Internet portals and children's play zones throughout. We felt, as we have before, like we had just flown from the Flintstones to the Jetsons. If all Americans could compare Berlin's luxurious central train station today with the grimy, decrepit Penn Station in New York City, they would swear we were the ones who lost World War II.

How could this be? We are a great power. How could we be borrowing money from Singapore? Maybe it's because Singapore is investing billions of dollars, from its own savings, into infrastructure and scientific research to attract the world's best talent -- including Americans.

Caution: Friedman ends with some harsh but brief words for the Clinton campaign, and similarly brief praise for Barack Obama's rhetoric. That's hardly why I recommend the article, but don't say I didn't warn you.

I leave you with this third insightful commentary, Friday's "Get Fuzzy" courtesy the funny papers.

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Morley Winograd is co-author with Michael D. Hais of Millennial Makeover: MySpace, YouTube and the Future of American Politics.

Despite all their efforts to put a positive spin on their Iowa showing on the plane to New Hampshire, the Clinton team couldn't avoid acknowledging the most important mistake they made in Iowa--discounting the youth vote.

Not only did Clinton lose to Barack Obama by an almost six to one margin among Millennial Generation (those under 25) caucus attendees, but also her weakness in this age group was the key to her overall loss among women. While Hillary carried the over 45 female vote 36%-24%, Obama won women under 45 by a 50%-21% margin and the surprisingly strong turnout among young caucus goers turned that margin into an overall defeat among the female constituency Hillary was counting on the most. Had she and her team only read their history, they wouldn't have been surprised by this outcome.

Every eighty years a "Civic" generation, like the GI Generation and now the Millennials, comes along with a determination to use their size and their facility with communication technology to change the political culture of America. 2008 will be the first election when Millennials, the largest generation in American history, born between 1982 and 2003, will be eligible to vote in sufficient numbers to tip the political scales to candidates who they favor, but they have already made their presence known to those analyzing election data, not just the latest poll results. They, along with the last remaining members of the GI Generation, were the only age groups to cast majority votes for John Kerry in 2004. The YouTube inspired involvement of Millennials in the Senate races in Virginia and Montana was the difference in those two close elections, returning Democrats to majority status in 2006. But those initial tremors are minor compared to the tsunami of change that Millennials will set in motion in the 2008 elections.

Jaded pollsters, like Clinton's Mark Penn, and columnists, like Thomas L. Friedman, who have been waiting for the emergence of a sizeable youth vote and youthful activism for decades, completely ignored this emerging phenomenon believing that today's youth would disappoint those hoping for any sign of political commitment, just as people under 25 had done ever since the 1970s. But that attitude, common among Baby Boomers who believe the entire world should think and act the way they do, represents a significant misreading of history.  Gen Xers, who adored and still revere Ronald Reagan and distrust government, were responsible for the decline in voter participation among young people in the 1980s and 1990s, but as studies by Harvard's Institute of Politics have demonstrated, ever since 9/11 today's youth have voted in increasing numbers, at a growth rate that surpasses that of all other generations. Now that they have a candidate like Barack Obama who appeals to this generation's partisan passion for changing America, their impact will reverberate across the country as loudly as it did in Iowa last week.

A careful observer of the Obama and Clinton campaigns' youth turnout efforts could have seen the results coming. Hillary's team were told to invite young people over for a night of watching TV shows like Gray's Anatomy or The Office, and use that opportunity to engage them in a conversation on the issues. Obama's team went about finding its cadre of supporters by using their website, built off of the FaceBook operating system or platform, in tune with Millennial's social networking habits. Once they found potential supporters, Obama's team didn't ask them to watch television, something Millennials do infrequently, unless it's on their laptop with shows downloaded from the Net, but to hang out at the local bar. There Michelle Obama, or "the closer" as her husband calls her, asked them to come out on caucus night and change America's politics forever.

Clinton's attempt to make her gender define the nature of the historic change in this election missed another important trait of Millennials. This generation is the most gender neutral, race-and ethnicity-blind group of young people in American history. Only sixty percent of Millennials are white; twenty percent have an immigrant parent; and, ninety percent have a friend of another race. While Baby Boomers are justifiably proud of their idealistic efforts on behalf of civil rights and women's rights, Millennials take diversity as a given and tolerance as the only acceptable behavior. That's why, on caucus night, young women voted for Obama and his message of hope, while older women felt motivated to support the first credible female candidate for President.  Once again, the Clinton's circle of Boomer advisors just couldn't understand why everyone wasn't thinking and behaving like they did. .

The generational differences in the two candidate's teams were embarrassingly obvious during their speeches to their supporters on caucus night. A collection of Silent and Boomer Generation former leaders, from Madeline Albright to Wesley Clark, not to mention Bill Clinton, was planted behind Hillary. Obama's backdrop was his kids, his wife and throngs of young supporters who knew that their efforts had created an historic moment for the country. Given this generational bias, really a blind spot in their thinking, it's hard to believe Hillary can fix her problem with Millennials before the final campaign showdown on February 5, let alone in the few days between Iowa and New Hampshire. But if she can't find a way to appeal to this emerging generation quickly and on its own terms, she will become the first, but certainly not the last, candidate whose failure to recognize the historical pattern of generational cycles in American politics has cost them their future.  

Morley Winograd is co-author with Michael D. Hais of Millennial Makeover: MySpace, YouTube and the Future of American Politics (Rutgers University Press, March 2008)

A "Friedman," you will recall, is a unit of time. It is the "decisive" six month period during which the United States either wins or loses in Iraq.

Made famous - or infamous - by New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, the decisive six month period has confronted us many times, according to a tally by Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, which back in May 2006 counted no less than 14 instances between November, 2003 and May, 2006 in which Friedman predicted the next 6 months would be decisive.

Of course, such predictions flourish best in an environment where no-one looks back on them.

The jury is in on the last "Friedman,"McClatchy Newsreports, and for U.S. troops, it's the worst so far:

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