Portside

The Rowan County, KY, clerk's office issued a marriage license to Will Smith and James Yates this morning. Five of the six deputy clerks in the office say they will comply with the court order to give out licenses while county clerk Kim Davis is in jail. Kim Davis' husband Joe, meanwhile, remains defiant. “Just because five Supreme Court judges make a ruling, it’s not a law," he said.

Some people have a tendency to believe more; if you have tons of experience with pictures of the Virgin Mary, there's a greater likelihood that those higher parts of your visual system are going to match up the arbitrary stuff you're seeing to the template of the Virgin Mary you have in your brain.

Trump's attempts to bully the press to silence criticism of him is anti-American. He's followed up this salvo on the First Amendment with a strike at the 14th Amendment, asserting that he’d like to deny those born in the country their citizenship. The biggest enemy to the principles of the Constitution right now is Trump. No one has to twist his words because what he says is twisted enough. He speaks fluent pretzel.

The anti-immigrant, anti-Obama, anti-establishment sentiment that Trump is tapping runs deep within the Republican electorate. Many clearly see the president as a foreign-born secret Muslim with a clandestine plan to weaken, if not ruin, the United States and they have a dark, nearly apocalyptic view of Obama’s America. Voters this dissatisfied and this detached from reality will be looking for someone who can vent for them. Trump does that.

Judy Collins -- Bread and Roses. How Wolves Change Rivers. Man With Arms Raised Killed by San Antonio Police. I Didn't Come From Your Rib (You Came From My Vagina). Police Recruitment Video Features Military-style Tactics.

Reader Comments: U.S. Trade Union Support for BDS; Pacific Coast Farm Worker Rebellion; Cornel West - Sanders, Trump and BLM; Selma - Site of National Dumping; North Dakota Legalizes Drone Strikes; Solidarity Confinement Victory in California; Israel, Iran; Sex Trade, Sex Workers and Amnesty International; Announcements: - New App for Worker Rights; Charleston, Chicago, Brooklyn, Bay Area, New York

The forthcoming film Concussion, starring Will Smith, is coming for the NFL. If Concussion came out now, it would get less coverage than the Washington quarterback controversy. But tragically, we know that by December, another season of injuries, another season of tragedies will be winding down and the film will amplify all of those renewed concerns.

[M]inority candidates will, with some frequency, come with unconventional political backgrounds and views as judged from majority perspectives. Regentally imposed political tests which assault the academic freedom of all will fall upon such candidates with unusual severity. (Leon Letwin's letter in defense of Angela Davis in 1969, relevant today as we defend faculty members such as Steven Salaita.)

The EU's belt-tightening measures are cutting holes in Europe's social-safety net. Austerity as an economic strategy is more than just throwing a scare into countries that, exhausted by years of cutbacks and high unemployment, are thinking of changing course. It's laying the groundwork for the triumph of multinational corporate capitalism - undermining the social contract between labor and capital that's characterized much of Europe for the past two generations.

Images of Czech police inking the skin of newly arriving Syrian migrants, and the government says they were unaware that this brought back memories of the Holocaust, when prisoners at Auschwitz were systematically tattooed. While in the north of Europe, in 24 hours, responding to a Facebook campaign, 10,000 Icelanders opened their doors to their Syrian brothers and sisters.