Republicans in Congress are going to be interesting to watch for the next two years, as they try to cope with the influx of the Tea Party Republicans who have just been elected to office. Some of these skirmishes are happening already, as both parties prepare to hold their official party caucus meetings this week, where they will vote on their leadership positions and on their policies for the next Congress. The Tea Party Republicans failed to elevate Representative Michele Bachmann to the lowest rung of the House leadership positions, causing her to withdraw her candidacy last week. But just today, the Tea Partiers seem to have won a policy battle over in the Senate, as the establishment Republican leader Mitch McConnell just announced that he has seen the light on banning earmarks -- a dramatic reversal of his position up to this point.

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But for anyone who thinks that American voters just elected a bunch of clowns to represent them in Washington, I humbly draw your attention to Brazil, where they just elected a real clown to their Congress.

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The town of Mountain Pass, California, is about as close to a ghost town as you can get without actually being empty. The town lies fifteen miles in from the Nevada border, on the interstate highway route from Los Angeles to Las Vegas. It is a mining boom town that went bust -- and not back in the Wild West days, but very recently. But it's not just any mining town out in the desert, it's a very special one.

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President Obama conveniently scheduled a trip to Asia immediately after this year's midterm elections. This has worked, so far, as designed -- it removed Obama from the political scene in Washington, while serious jockeying for position takes place among both major American political parties (leadership elections will be one of the first things the lame duck Congress will do when it reconvenes next week). This also has allowed Obama a pause to consider exactly what his next political steps are going to be, now that he faces two years of a politically-divided Congress (with Republicans in charge of the House, and Democrats still nominally in charge of the Senate).

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Democrats in the 111th Congress may be down, but they are not quite out yet. Due to the quirky nature of our political calendar, the "old" Congress will reconvene in a week or so, and stay in session through December, and then the "new" or incoming Congress will be convened for the first time in January. What, if anything, this "lame duck session" will accomplish is an open question. They certainly won't have any shortage of issues to tackle, and this may well be the last chance Democrats get at moving their agenda forward for the next two years. Whether they will take this window of opportunity to do so or not remains to be seen, though.

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An interesting article caught my eye last week, but what with all the election hoopla, I haven't had a chance to write about it before now. But even if it went mostly unnoticed by the public at large, it was an important and downright scathing indictment of the Democrats' complete inability to get their message out, so it certainly fits in with our theme here on Fridays. Some may feel, perhaps, that the word "indictment" is too strong to use here. I disagree. In fact, I'll make the statement even stronger: this article is an absolute epitaph -- which should be carved into the gravestone laid on top of the corpse of the Democrats' efforts to communicate their virtues to the voters in the 2010 midterm elections.

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We now find ourselves in such a "day after the revolution" situation, to some degree or another, in American politics. The question of whether or not folks will be fooled again is going to grow larger throughout the next two years, over on the Right. The question is inherently impossible to answer at this point, but it hasn't stopped the song from running through my head as we survey the post-revolutionary political scene. And, so far, this "parting on the right" is already causing some headaches for the Republicans in Washington. I speak, of course, of the Tea Partiers.

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Proposition 25, as I said, will likely have no national implications (as 19 and 23 do). But that doesn't mean it isn't important. What Proposition 25 will do, if it passes, is to change our state laws regarding how budgets are voted on in our legislature. Already, I can feel readers' eyelids drooping, as it sounds like a pretty wonky subject, for which I apologize.

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It's that time of year again... the time when we pre-empt our usual Friday Talking Points column here and instead gather 'round the virtual campfire and shove a metaphorical flashlight under our chin, and proceed to tell two tales of horror guaranteed to make your blood run like ice water in the veins, no matter which side of the political divide you hail from.

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Incivility seems to be running fairly high in the country right now, what with heads being crushed under boots by political supporters and whatnot. But the incivility which has me scratching my head has nothing to do with politics. Instead, I've been asking a question which (so far) has remained unanswered, so I toss it out today in the hopes that a sports whiz knows the answer: Why do professional baseball players not shake hands with the other team after the game?

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