THE 2010 National Book Award winners.

IN THE MAIL: Citizen’s Handbook to Influencing Elected Officials: Citizen Advocacy in State Legislatures and Congress: A Guide for Citizen Lobbyists and Grassroots Advocates. Looks pretty useful.

MEGAN MCARDLE: Dear Airline, I’m Leaving You. “But don’t feel too bad. It’s not you, it’s me. Or rather, it’s the TSA. I’m not going to lie. It’s come between us. If I have to let someone else see me naked in order to be with you–well, I’m just not that kinky. And deep down, I don’t think you are either. I think it’s the TSA making you act like this. Frankly, you haven’t been the same since you started running around together. . . . Uncle Sam may not care about the minority of voters who fly often. But I’m kinda hoping that you guys do.”

GARY WICKERT: The 2011 Tax Tsunami.

NICARAGUA: Ortega Picks On Costa Rica to Rally Support At Home.

PRICES: Big Mac Alert!

ED MORRISSEY: Time For Eric Holder To Go. “The failure of Holder’s DoJ to win anything more than a single conspiracy count against Ghailani as a result of using a process designed for domestic criminals than wartime enemies shows that the critics had it right all along. It also shows that both Obama and Holder have been proven spectacularly wrong, since a man who confessed to the murder of over two hundred people will now face no more than 20 years, with a big chunk of whatever sentence Foopie receives being reduced by time already served. . . . There could be no greater failure by the DoJ in this war on terror than to get these decisions wrong, especially in light of the avalanche of criticism over those decisions and the administration’s reaction to it.”

And making an even bigger mockery of the whole thing is the Administration’s claim of “post-acquittal detention power.” So the whole thing was just a show trial anyway. Ah, remember the fierce moral urgency of change? Apparently, it was the fierce moral urgency of show trials. But that doesn’t get Holder off the hook. He botched a show trial, after all . . .

WALTER SHAPIRO: The Barbed Wire Airport: Is America Afflicted With Security Fatigue? I think it’s more like security theater fatigue.

CIRCULAR FIRING SQUAD ALERT: “A coalition of conservative organizations and leaders pledged today to field primary opponents for Republican senators who ‘unfairly’ criticize Sen. Jim DeMint, the South Carolina Republican who led an insurgent funding effort that helped elect several of the six GOP freshmen senators in the 112th Congress.”

Going after people over policy is fine. Going after people over criticism of politicians is thuggish. It’s even kinda . . . MoveOnish. Need I say more?

UPDATE: Dan Riehl says I’m wrong, but I have to say that — as someone who’s been quite supportive of DeMint’s efforts — I don’t find Dan’s tone particularly reassuring on the non-MoveOnish front . . . .

ANOTHER UPDATE: A reader emails: “He’s the target of a leak campaign by the Senate Republican leadership. This is well known among movement conservatives. The moveon.org comparison seems better aimed at the leakers than his defenders. Just my opinion. But that’s probably what annoys Dan.”

I didn’t know that.

MORE: Relax, folks. Dan and I have kissed and made up.

HMM: “The differences in raw wages may be almost entirely the result of the individual choices being made by both male and female workers.”

Related: Why Dutch Women Don’t Work Longer Hours. “The Dutch began identifying women’s failure to participate in the workforce more aggressively as a major social problem in the 1990s, which led to a tax reform intended to incentivise women out of the cosy ‘trap’ of part-time work. Instead, most women used the better tax treatment as a way to work less.”

AT AMAZON, top deals in electronics.

INSTAVISION: I talk with Michelle Caruso-Cabrera of CNBC about the Tea Party movement, fiscal responsibility as social responsibility, and her new book, You Know I’m Right: More Prosperity, Less Government. It’s an excellent book — highly recommended.

UPDATE: Here’s the YouTube version. (Bumped).

ROGER SIMON: The New York Times, Sarah Palin, and the gravitas gap.

AT STANFORD, the ROTC debate heats up.

ANDREA TANTAROS: With GOP in control of House of Representatives, committees should begin giving public answers.

CHICAGO CITY PENSIONS are broke.

RAND SIMBERG: NASA Goes Badly Off Course, Needs A New Commander.

VOTING WITH YOUR TIRES: A reader who asks anonymity weighs in on the TSA scandal:

I recently did a 2900 mile round trip for business. I took two days vacation in conjunction and drove rather than fly. At this point I see no reason to fly anywhere I might be likely to go. You can thank TSA for that. You can also thank the airlines and airports that drop-kicked this particular ball to the feds. While touted as enhancing ‘securitah’ what really drove the train was cost reduction, I suspicion. If nothing changes then I’ll remain a former flyer until I win the lottery, acquire a Cessna and do my own pilotage.

Sigh.

UPDATE: A different reader who requests anonymity emails:

I am a professor of management at a large state university in the southwestern US. I have done this for 15 years subsequent to a career in a Fortune 500 company. I read your site daily and always find something that makes me smile. Thus, I offer a couple of observations regarding your recent threads on the TSA screening debacle. Anyone that studies organizations or has spent time in corporate or large-government environments, understands why the TSA and the Department of Homeland Security were bad ideas. The expressed goal was to integrate all of the diverse elements associated with public security into one entity and make them work seamlessly. The only way to do this, however, is through fairly rigid bureaucratic rules and strict policy guidelines. How would you control the behavior of screeners in diverse places such as Minot and NYC? You do it through strict policy and procedures. You simply cannot permit discretion on the part of individuals as this would jeopardize organizational control of these people. This is why TSA seems mindless… the thinking is being done elsewhere, at the time the procedure is written. This is also why large-scale technical solutions like backscatter machines are favored. These are the only ones compatible with the organizational structures of TSA. I would think that even within the leadership of TSA you would get an admission that an Israeli-style security scheme is far more effective. The problem is scalability – and the bureaucratic nature of large organizations. The Israeli model requires allowing discretion on the part of the screener, which would require hiring employees capable of thoughtfully exercising it (better hiring, training, pay, etc.) and far fewer rigid policies and procedures. One more note. The trend in organizations for several years now is toward decentralizing, flexibility, and mass customization (the achieving of large scale efficiencies on an almost individual level). This is why I favor going back to doing security locally. Think local Fire Marshall vs the OSHA inspector. Who is really getting the job done?

Yes, I called Homeland Security The Department of Bureaucratic Security back when it was established, and I think my predictions have been borne out. “It will be a lot of things, but what it doesn’t seem to be is much of a weapon against terrorism.”

MARK TAPSCOTT: No Union For Transportation Security Workers. “Despite years of imposing increasingly invasive new security procedures, the TSA has yet to catch one terrorist. By contrast, the Washington Post reported in May that ‘at least 23’ TSA agents have been fired since 2007 for stealing from passengers.”

TRUST ‘EM THEY’RE FROM THE GOVERNMENT: TSA does not perform psychological evaluations on officers. “To become a Transportation Security Administration (TSA) agent fully empowered to aggressively pat down passengers — even inside passengers’ underwear — applicants need not pass any psychological testing despite having full federal backing.”

JIM TREACHER: Be sure to sign the ‘thank you’ card for Nancy Pelosi.

MILT WOLF on The Tea Parties and the Republican Establishment. “The Tea Party movement exists, I told them, not because of the Democrats. We know who they are, with their tax increases, endless spending and Washington-knows-best takeovers. No, the Tea Parties exist because of the failures of the Republican Party. We were supposed to be the ones Americans could trust.”

JOEL KOTKIN: END OF THE CALIFORNIA ERA, BEGINNING OF THE TEXAS ERA.

In the future, historians may likely mark the 2010 midterm elections as the end of the California era and the beginning of the Texas one. In one stunning stroke, amid a national conservative tide, California voters essentially ratified a political and regulatory regime that has left much of the state unemployed and many others looking for the exits.

California has drifted far away from the place that John Gunther described in 1946 as “the most spectacular and most diversified American state … so ripe, golden.” Instead of a role model, California has become a cautionary tale of mismanagement of what by all rights should be the country’s most prosperous big state. Its poverty rate is at least two points above the national average; its unemployment rate nearly three points above the national average. . . .

Texas’ trajectory, however, looks quite the opposite. California was recently ranked by Chief Executive magazine as having the worst business climate in the nation, while Texas’ was considered the best. Both Democrats and Republicans in the Lone State State generally embrace the gospel of economic growth and limited public sector expenditure.

Read the whole thing.

REASON TV: The Fight For the Right To Eat What You Want.

CLARICE FELDMAN: Eric Holder Strikes Out In First Gitmo Civilian Trial.