President Barack Obama has a busy week scheduled, as Congress begins the lame duck session. Everyone in Washington has a few busy weeks ahead, until the 111th Congress wraps up business and heads off into the sunset, but President Obama will be at the center of this whirlwind. So it's worth taking a look at how the week is going to play out. To put it in football-watching terms, we're just returning from the "two-minute warning" commercial break, in the fourth quarter. And anything could happen.

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So I invite you all to peruse the Thanksgiving presidential proclamations of years past. And, while doing so, give thanks for the internet and the web which make such easy access to information possible.

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Well, I don't know about anyone else, but I thought that was a pretty good week for Democrats.

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Democrats seem to be eager to fight a few battles before the sun sets on the 111th Congress. Strong statements have come from the most unlikely people. Votes are being scheduled on some very contentious issues. This push seems coordinated between the White House, the Senate, the House, and even the Pentagon. Meaning that the lame duck session might be a lot more productive than generally assumed, in the end.

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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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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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