We begin today’s roundup with an editorial from The Sacramento Bee on the demise of Black Friday (since many of the deals are released the week beforehand):
Though some hardy traditionalists no doubt spent Thursday night camped outside some department store entrance, most holiday shoppers understand that the post-Thanksgiving lawn-chair-and-thermos ritual is by now a quaint throwback. Black Friday has been going on now for at least a week. [...] [S]ome may mourn the loss of one of the few rituals that still seemed to bring Americans together. After all, the doorbuster deal line doesn’t care if you’re red state or blue state, Fox News or MSNBC.
Evolution does have its consolations. Earnings may be taking a hit at Macy’s and Nordstrom, but nature still beckons. REI is shutting its doors for the day and urging shoppers to #OptOutside. Forty-nine parks will be free to visitors on Friday in California, thanks to an anonymous donation to the Save the Redwoods League.
But whether the day after Thanksgiving is, for you, a merry, silver-bells tradition or an ominous sign that end days are a-comin’, it may help to know that studies have shown its retail sales number to actually have no bearing, historically, on the profitability of a Christmas shopping season.
Turning now to politics,
Timothy Egan at The New York Times writes about Donald Trump’s rhetoric in the race for the Republican nomination:
Take him at his word — albeit, a worthless thing given his propensity for telling outright lies and not backing down when called on them — Donald Trump’s reign would be a police state. He has now outlined a series of measures that would make the United States an authoritarian nightmare. Trump is no longer entertaining, or diversionary. He’s a billionaire brute, his bluster getting more ominous by the day.
At The Washington Post, Eugene Robinson explains how the GOP brought this primary on itself:
As the leading Republican presidential candidates rant and rave about deporting 11 million immigrants, fighting some kind of world war against Islam, implementing gimmicky tax plans that would bankrupt the nation and other such madness, keep one thing in mind: The party establishment brought this plague upon itself.
The self-harming was unintentional but inevitable — and should have been foreseeable. Donald Trump and Ben Carson didn’t come out of nowhere. Fully half of the party’s voters didn’t wake up one morning and decide for no particular reason that experience as a Republican elected official was the last thing they wanted in a presidential candidate.
The St. Louis Post-Dispatch uses its post-Thanksgiving editorial to call for action on climate change:
As global leaders prepare to gather for a climate summit in Paris, it’s important that the world deals with scientific reality, however difficult it may be and whoever’s salary it may put at risk. [...] Action won’t be painless, but it also won’t be as burdensome as opponents suggest. Renewable energy sources are becoming more competitive with fossil fuels every day, and when you consider the massive environmental and public health costs that the fossil fuel industry currently shifts to the public, clean energy looks even more attractive.
That industry and its powerful allies cannot see past short-term political and financial gain to understand the magnitude of the risks they are subjecting all of us to.
Climate change denial is a sickness with many causes. If the world cannot overcome it and commit to real action, the consequences will be ruinous.
On a final note, Susan Goldberg, editor in chief of National Geographic, adds her take at CNN:
Climate change is affecting nearly everything. It's displacing entire cultures, posing challenges to our health, weakening our economies and threatening our national security.
The question we face as journalists who chronicle the state of the planet is stark: Will we write a new chapter in the progress of humankind? Or will we write the obituary of Earth?
As world leaders meet in Paris this month for the U.N. Climate Change Conference, it appears, thankfully, that the years of dithering and denial finally may be behind us. While some leading presidential candidates continue to question the science and impact of climate change, recent polls show that three-quarters of Americans now acknowledge that climate change is happening.