A Thanksgiving Day good news list

Along with giving thanks for making it to another Thanksgiving Day, The Times’ editorial board is grateful that:

The 2012 elections are finally over. And that after the June presidential primary, the November general election, this coming March’s mayoral primary and the May runoff, we in Los Angeles will be able to go a year without an election.

With the $4-billion sale of Lucasfilm to Walt Disney Co., the “Star Wars” franchise’s future is secured and a seventh feature film is in the works.

President Obama, who unlike his Republican opponent Mitt Romney, had a well-articulated and mathematically sound plan for reducing the federal deficit and restoring the nation’s fiscal health, was reelected to another four-year term.

Because of Proposition 30, students in Los Angeles Unified School District will get a full school year in 2012-13, even if the kids themselves might not be so grateful.

The U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals rejected Proposition 8, the California ballot measure that defined marriage as a union between one man and one woman.

Americans are, one state at a time, recognizing that marriage is not a gift of the government but a fundamental right that all are entitled to enjoy. On election day, three states recognized that right, and a fourth rejected an attempt to curtail it.

Blockbuster record sales are still possible even in a post-Tower Records world. (Proof: Taylor Swift’s album “Red.”)

The U.S. Supreme Court upheld the individual mandate in President Obama’s healthcare law, without which the financial underpinnings of the system would have collapsed. We’re especially grateful to Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. for his pivotal opinion on the issue, even though he reached his conclusion by a novel, even strange, route.

After nearly 50 years of theorizing about it, scientists discovered evidence of the Higgs boson — also known as the God particle — seen as the key to understanding the existence of all mass in the universe. It is a triumph for physicists that opens a whole new arena of scientific inquiry.

Los Angeles will see a lot fewer plastic bags littering its streets, clogging its waterways and making their way into the ocean after the L.A. City Council passed a ban on plastic carry-out bags.

California at long last banned the practice of sentencing juvenile offenders to life in prison without possibility of parole, and the U.S. Supreme Court struck down other states’ mandatory life-without-parole sentences for juveniles.

A special commission on Los Angeles County jails thoroughly probed the management deficiencies that have made them more dangerous places than they should be. Sheriff Lee Baca has promised to adopt the recommended reforms; if so, that will earn him our gratitude as well.

Car-obsessed L.A. residents survived, indeed flourished, during the second weekend shutdown of a chunk of the 405 — better known as Carmageddon 2 — as part of the construction project to widen and improve the freeway. What the heck, let’s make this an annual thing.

Cal State University trustees quickly shelved a plan, just as students were supposed to get a rebate on a small part of their tuition, to impose new fees.

The Curiosity rover’s landing on Mars, overseen by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in La Cañada Flintridge, hit the bull’s eye.

Administrators returned Stephen King’s “Different Seasons” to the library shelves of Rocklin High School, where it had been wrongly banned by a school committee.

The U.S. Supreme Court tossed out most of an absurd and mean-spirited Arizona law, SB 1070, allowing the state to establish its own immigration standards. We hope other states considering similar laws will get the message.

Money can’t buy everything. Casino billionaire Sheldon Adelson spent some $50 million in the recent elections, first for GOP candidate Newt Gingrich, then for GOP nominee Mitt Romney — and lost both. Similarly, shadowy money poured into the California ballot measure campaigns at the end, but came up short.

The space shuttle Endeavor didn’t take out any Inglewood and South Los Angeles houses or apartments on its lumbering, 12-mile road trip to the California Science Museum.

A new California law forbids hounding, the cruel practice of letting dogs chase bears and bobcats for miles, frightening and exhausting the animals until they try to escape up a tree, so hunters can then corner and shoot them.

For whatever reason — the expertise of our police forces, the maturity of our population or just dumb luck — crime continues to be down in Los Angeles County.

Republican Senate candidate Todd Akin of Missouri blurted out his weird belief that the female body can shut down any pregnancy that might result from “a legitimate rape.” It reminded the nation of the significance of women’s issues in politics.

The Los Angeles Dodgers were sold and the Frank (and Jamie) McCourt era is now part of Dodger history.

L.A. Superior Court Judge Michael Nash, presiding judge of the Juvenile Court, presumptively opened dependency hearings to allow scrutiny of the court, its officers and juvenile advocates. And that the experiment seems to be working, with no harm to juveniles.

The Legislature has finally outlawed the noxious practice of lenders foreclosing on borrowers even as they work out loan modifications that would bring the borrowers out of default.

The housing market is starting to rebound, five years after the bubble burst.

When City Atty. Carmen Trutanich broke his pledge not to seek office as district attorney, voters called him on it.

After the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors blatantly violated state law by meeting behind closed doors to discuss public safety realignment, Dist. Atty. Steve Cooley didn’t let them get away with it.

Large numbers of California’s parks didn’t close due to budget problems, and that so many good citizens stepped forward with funding to keep them open — even if we’re less than thankful that the parks system later “discovered” that it had been sitting on enough money to make many of those donations unnecessary.

The arrival of two new types of high-definition television sets — “Ultra HD” and OLED TVs — significantly raises the bar on picture quality. They’re unaffordable now, but it’s just a matter of time before that changes.

The California Legislature had the foresight to start setting up an insurance exchange well in advance, rather than waiting to see whether the healthcare law would survive legal and political challenges. As a result, the state’s exchange will be better prepared to serve millions of individual insurance buyers than the marketplaces that many other states are now rushing to set up.

The frenetic innovation in mobile devices continues, despite the attempts by Apple and its rivals to chill the marketplace with patent lawsuits.

SOPA and PIPA, the overly broad bills sought by the entertainment industry to combat foreign websites that thrive off of copyright infringement, were defeated. The problem is real, but the proposed solutions were deeply flawed.

Finally, one set of parents — those at Desert Trails Elementary School in Adelanto — won the right to force changes at their school through the state’s “parent trigger” law.

San Francisco Giants pitcher Sergio Romo made a cheerful foray into politics on the occasion of the Giants’ World Series victory. At the parade for the team, Romo wore a T-shirt with the slogan “I just look illegal,” reminding all of us that the immigration debate too often has descended into ethnic stereotyping.

Catholic liberals ably rebutted suggestions by the church’s hierarchy that the only proper “Catholic” vote was for Republican candidates. They pointed out that, while Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan may have been closer to the bishops’ position on abortion, President Obama and the Democrats were more in line with church pronouncements about the importance of healthcare and a social safety net.

Vice President Joe Biden commented on a TV talk show that he was “absolutely comfortable” with same-sex marriage. Biden’s seemingly unorchestrated embrace of marriage equality pressed President Obama to complete his own “evolution” toward the same position.