Welcome back to our annual year-end awards column!

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Welcome everyone to our year-end awards columns! Every year, we pre-empt our normal "Friday Talking Points" columns for two weeks, in order to take a look back at the year that was.

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Let's take a quick look back at the week that was, which was actually chock full of political news. We'll begin in outer space and end up with amusing holiday news, so buckle your seatbelts, it's going to be a fast ride this week. So fast that we're not even going to explain the column's title until you reach the talking points at the end, just to warn you. Ready? OK, here we go....

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A little-noted anniversary happened this week -- because it has been 80 years since Americans came to their senses and passed the Twenty-First Amendment, thus repealing the lunacy of Prohibition. So there's something to raise a glass to, over the weekend. So to speak.

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The Obama administration just rolled out what could be called "version 1.1" of HealthCare.gov, the website set up as a health insurance exchange for Americans who live in states which didn't set up their own state-level exchanges. In the computer world, "version 1.1" normally means "the first bug-fix version" of a piece of software. After two months of nothing short of disaster, the White House is now confident that the website is ready for prime time. Mostly.

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But having said all of that, and barring any unforeseen gigantic issues on the horizon, we can at least look at what both parties have to play around with in the campaign. One side in particular is already telegraphing what will occupy the center stage of their campaign platform. It's not even really "guesswork" to state now that Republicans will be placing Obamacare at the center of their efforts. Figuring out the Democratic strategy is a bit harder, though.

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Millions of Americans will travel home for Thanksgiving this year, and millions of the same Americans will get into heated political discussions at some point during the festivities. Most of these political discussions will wind up convincing nobody, because the whole point of them is (at heart) to casually ridicule other members of your family -- you could just as easily tease each other about who you went to the prom with or some other event from your past. The net result is the same. Liberals will travel to heartland towns and be called tree-hugging bleeding hearts (or worse) and conservatives will travel to cosmopolitan settings and be called heartless hicks and hayseeds (or worse), and everyone will then happily decamp to the living room to watch football.

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This was a big week in the political world, so we've got a lot to get through before we get to the big, explosive "nuclear option" story. In fact, it was even a big week just for political anniversaries. Fifty years ago this week, an event of no little importance happened. I speak, of course, tomorrow's 50th anniversary of the first broadcast of Doctor Who by the BBC.

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The proper response to such prognostication, at this point, is really: "It's way too early!" This is because it is, in fact, too early to predict much of anything that will be happening in 2016. It is, to borrow a favored phrase of Steve Jobs, insanely early for such speculation.

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Wedgie: When a political party's "wedge" issue turns on them and instead of dividing the other party, begins to divide their own.

Usage: "Boy, the Republicans are really getting a giant wedgie on immigration, aren't they?"

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