Midday open thread: Dreadnoughtus dinosaur weighed 130,000 pounds, Sanford v. Sanford again

• Today's comic by Mark Fiore is The Presidential Painsuit:
  
  Join us today at 12:30 PM PT when Faith Gardner hosts another edition of Ask Me Anything (about Daily Kos).
• What's coming up on Sunday Kos ...
  

  • Fighting racism … one keystroke at a time, by Denise Oliver Velez
  • No, it really was just an effort to smear Michael Brown, by Hunter
  • The good news in falling premiums means more work for Obamacare customers, by Joan McCarter
  • Welcome to Sunday. Now let's hear from John McCain, by Hunter
  • Greed is good for a select few, by Mark E Andersen
  • Good bosses aren't good enough, by Laura Clawson
  • Will we be conned into war again, by Egberto Willies
  • Yet another state, yet another malevolent anti-abortion law, by Hunter
  • Instead of 'legitimate rape' remarks, this time right-wing economic policies are sinking GOP chances, by Ian Reifowitz

• These Daily Kos community posts were the most shared on Facebook September 4:
  

  Pat Robertson advises 80 year old tither to get her butt to work, by Steveningen

  Bob McDonnell & Wife Found GUILTY on Most Counts, by ericlewis0

• An apology for not remembering it's 2014. From The Economist:

  Apology: In our review of “The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism” by Edward Baptist, we said: “Mr Baptist has not written an objective history of slavery. Almost all the blacks in his book are victims, almost all the whites villains.” There has been widespread criticism of this, and rightly so. Slavery was an evil system, in which the great majority of victims were blacks, and the great majority of whites involved in slavery were willing participants and beneficiaries of that evil. We regret having published this and apologise for having done so. We are therefore withdrawing the review but in the interests of transparency, anybody who wants to see the withdrawn review can click here.

• A lifelong fan reflects on shame, love, fatherhood, and the future of the NFL:

  Except this offseason was a nightmare. Michael Sam declared for the draft, then came out as gay. It was a step forward in sports history, but it also put a spotlight on the uglier views within the NFL’s machine—not just the lowest common denominators defending their perceived frontier of masculinity, but the deepest recesses of the apparatus itself: scouts and executives who spoke anonymously about the "distraction," and the media outlets that harbored that cowardice for pageviews.

  Less than a week later, Ray Rice knocked his fiancee unconscious in a casino, then dragged her out of an elevator with less care than you’d give a sack of potatoes. Roger Goodell and the NFL reviewed the horrifying video, ignored legal and ethical guidelines in interviewing Palmer about the assault, and—after months of deliberation—suspended Rice a paltry two games. A month later, Goodell upheld Josh Gordon’s year-long suspension for a positive marijuana test. Somewhere, on a private jet or in a leather chair or at a podium surrounded by handpicked bootlickers, Dan Snyder saved face with the worst of Washington fans by reiterating his stance on the team’s racist name.

• Scientists: Milky Way part of galactic supercluster 500 million light-years in diameter.
• Bitterness has not left Jenny Sanford yet: The ex-wife of former South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford, still fuming over the affair he had with his Argentinian lover, has made new accusations in a court filing that had him denying and apologizing (on his Facebook page).

  In the papers, Jenny Sanford asks that the GOP lawmaker undergo a psychiatric evaluation and complete an anger management class. She further suggests that he’s been under the influence of excessive alcohol and prescription drugs.

• Still an adolescent when it died, giant dinosaur tipped the scales at 130,000 pounds:

  Scientists have discovered and described a new supermassive dinosaur species with the most complete skeleton ever found of its type. At 85 feet (26 m) long and weighing about 65 tons (59,300 kg) in life, Dreadnoughtus schrani is the largest land animal for which a body mass can be accurately calculated. [...]

  "Dreadnoughtus schrani was astoundingly huge," said Kenneth Lacovara, PhD, an associate professor in Drexel University's College of Arts and Sciences, who discovered the Dreadnoughtus fossil skeleton in southern Patagonia in Argentina and led the excavation and analysis."It weighed as much as a dozen African elephants or more than seven T. rex. Shockingly, skeletal evidence shows that when this 65-ton specimen died, it was not yet full grown.

• Team Blackness discusses the theft and internet spread of photos of celebrities in the nude. To say, as some have, that Jennifer Lawrence ought to “own” the digital sex crime against her just because she’s a hot movie star is like telling a rape victim to own her assault because she put on a cute dress and went to a party. It's enough to make you want to go back to just using stone tablets. Subscribe on iTunes | Subscribe On Stitcher | Direct Download | RSS
• On today's Kagro in the Morning show: perv busted by woman he assaulted. Greg Dworkin on McDonnell conviction, Economist's slavery gaffe & Risen on ISIS. TX school districts militarize. SciFi barrier broken. Gideon flags antibiotic resistance bill. Q: Why GunFAIL? A: Idaho State.