It may feel as traditional as leftover turkey, but it’s only been since the 1960s that retailers have named the day after Thanksgiving, when bargain shoppers hunt for discount goods like big game, "Black Friday." But this year, black could just refer to the pall cast on store employees’ holidays, which have been increasingly cut short in an effort to start the sales earlier and earlier.

In Nebraska, rumors of a Thanksgiving midnight opening at the Omaha North Target store where Anthony Hardwick has worked for the past three years first circulated on Facebook. By the time store managers confirmed that employees were scheduled to start their shifts at 11 p.m. Thanksgiving Day, the part-time parking attendant had taken matters into his own hands.

From all of us here at TAP, Happy Thanksgiving.

Tom Laskawy at Grist ran across this CBS report on school lunches in France. The gourmet, five-course meals that every child eats offer a sharp contrast to our mostly horrible school-lunch system and, as Laskawy notes, it seems impossible for us to institute even modest reforms. The reauthorization of the Childhood Nutrition Act, which the Senate has passed but the House has not, is mired in politics; its fate relies on what happens in November.

The Tea Party is frequently described as a new phenomena in American politics, but as Kevin Drum notes in a piece for Mother Jones, the opposite is true; like the John Birch Society or Arkansas Project before it, the Tea Party is the latest instance of a right-wing reaction that happens whenever we have a Democratic president: