Bob Dylan has announced the release details of the latest in his 'Bootleg Series' collections.
The songwriter releases 'The Bootleg Series Volume 9 - The Witmark Demos' on October 18. Featuring two-discs, the 47-tracks were recorded by Dylan for his first music publisher Leeds Music, in January 1962, and his second publisher, M. Witmark & Sons, from 1962 to 1964.
The tracklisting for 'The Bootleg Series Volume 9 - The Witmark Demos' is:

Disc 1

'Man On The Street (Fragment)'
'Hard Times In New York Town'
'Poor Boy Blues
'Ballad For A Friend'
'Rambling, Gambling Willie'
'Talking Bear Mountain Picnic Massacre Blues'
'Standing On The Highway'
'Man On The Street'
'Blowin’ In The Wind'
'Long Ago, Far Away'
'A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall'
'Tomorrow Is A Long Time'
'The Death of Emmett Till'
'Let Me Die In My Footsteps'
'Ballad Of Hollis Brown'
'Quit Your Low Down Ways'
'Baby, I’m In The Mood For You'
'Bound To Lose, Bound To Win'
'All Over You'
'I’d Hate To Be You On That Dreadful Day'
'Long Time Gone'
'Talkin’ John Birch Paranoid Blues'
'Masters Of War'
'Oxford Town'
'Farewell'

Disc 2

'Don't Think Twice, It’s All Right'
'Walkin’ Down The Line'
'I Shall Be Free'
'Bob Dylan’s Blues'
'Bob Dylan’s Dream'
'Boots Of Spanish Leather'
'Walls of Red Wing'
'Girl From The North Country'
'Seven Curses'
'Hero Blues'
'Whatcha Gonna Do?'
'Gypsy Lou'
'Ain’t Gonna Grieve'
'John Brown'
'Only A Hobo'
'When The Ship Comes In'
'The Times They Are A-Changin''
'Paths Of Victory'
'Guess I’m Doing Fine'
'Baby Let Me Follow You Down'
'Mama, You Been On My Mind'
'Mr. Tambourine Man'
'I’ll Keep It With Mine'

@'NME'

Murdoch published Imam Rauf's book on Islam and America

Check out this revealing nugget at the end of Todd Gitlin's take on Cordoba Initiative leader Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf's book What’s Right with Islam is What’s Right with America:

The book closes with an appendix containing a fatwa issued by five Muslim clerics on September 27, 2001, at the request of the most senior Muslim chaplain in the American armed forces. Ending his book with a fatwa! Yes! Cunningly, it’s a “Fatwa Permitting U. S. Muslim Military Personnel to Participate in Afghanistan War Effort.”
What’s Right with Islam, by the way, was published by HarperSanFrancisco, which last I looked is owned by Rupert Murdoch.

So not only is the second-largest shareholder of Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. funding Imam Rauf's initiatives in the U.S., but Murdoch himself is responsible for publishing Rauf's theological and political writings.
The fact that conservatives haven't blasted Murdoch's links to Imam Rauf demonstrates the insincerity of their attacks on Imam Rauf and American Muslims. As Gitlin argues (and should be obvious from the book's title), Imam Rauf's book is in fact a celebration of the U.S. Constitution, an embrace of religious freedom and pluralism, and an outright rejection of radical fundamentalism.
Imam Rauf's critics -- like Rick Santorum who last night called him a jihadist -- attack him as being outside of the ideological mainstream of American political and religious thinking, but their claims are without merit. Indeed, the Bush and Obama administrations asked Imam Rauf to represent the United States to the Islamic world precisely because he believes that the United States form of government should be a model for Muslims across the world -- not the other way around.
Indeed, in many respects, Rauf's critics have more in common with the fundamentalist Muslims they claim to be fighting than they do with mainstream Americans -- including Imam Rauf. The critics are the problem. Not Imam Rauf.

Jed Lewison @'Daily Kos'

Dennis Hopper's Dynamite Death Chair Act

With cameos from Terry Southern & Wim Wenders.

Drug 'users' NOT 'abusers'

Don't label heroin users as 'junkies' - Drug Commission

Billionaire Funder and Fox News Collude in Glenn Beck’s Affront to Martin Luther King’s “I Have A Dream” Speech

Tim Phillips, president of the Americans for Prosperity Foundation, flatly denies that his organization has any partnership with Rupert Murdoch, CEO of Fox News’ parent company, News Corporation. Still, the coincidental evidence keeps piling up.

Take, for instance, the cheapy-cheap deals available through the AFPF Web site for those wishing to travel to Washington, D.C., for the big Glenn Beck event, Restoring Honor — which happens to take place at the Lincoln Memorial on the 47th anniversary of Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, which took place in the same hallowed location.

Okay, so AFPF doesn’t advertise the deals as being for the Beck event; they just happen to be wrapping their own annual D.C. conference around the Beck event, and will be ferrying attendees to their Defending the American Dream confab to the Beck event. And the buses will conveniently not leave D.C. until the Beck event concludes. (Coincidentally, FreedomWorks, which is using Glenn Beck’s image and endorsement to peddle membership in its Take America Back election campaign, is also hosting a conference the same weekend.)

Just how good are the deals? Well, check this out. (Bear in mind that the Beck event is on Saturday, Aug. 28, and the conference begins on Friday, Aug. 27.) Let’s say you want to travel from Orlando, Florida, and you insist on single occupancy in your hotel. A package that includes the conference registration fee ($99 if purchased separately), transportation, two nights in a good Washington, D.C., hotel, two meals, and transportation back and forth to the Beck event will run you $450. (One of those meals is a dinner banquet staged in honor of the late President Ronald Reagan.) If you choose double occupancy in the hotel, you still get all that (plus a roommate) for $300.

Why don’t we progressives, you ask, get deals like this? Why are we always couch-surfing, carpooling and brown-bagging our meals to get to our events? Well, we don’t have David Koch, the billionaire oil-and-gas-and-financial-derivatives magnate bankrolling our movement. Koch, you’ll recall, chairs the board of the Americans For Prosperity Foundation.

Now, back to Glenn Beck and Rupert Murdoch. Fox will likely tell you that Beck’s event is a Beck, not a Fox, extravaganza. Sure, but what is the source of Beck’s fame? Where does he promote his event? Fox News, of course. Do you really think he’d be doing that without Rupert’s blessing?

One more time: Glenn Beck is Rupert Murdoch’s community organizer.

Last year, at the Americans For Prosperity Foundation’s RightOnline conference in Pittsburgh, I noticed that one-third of the speakers on the roster at the conference plenary were paid commentators or full-time employees of Murdoch’s News Corp. So I asked AFPF President Tim Phillips if he had a partnership with Murdoch. He seemed a bit thrown by the question.

“We have someone from Fox News?” he asked.

“Well, Fox News Channel contributors,” I replied.

“OK. So, they’re not on the payroll of Fox News. Do any of those guys get money from Fox News?”

Actually two of the five News Corp.-affiliated speakers were paid contributors to Fox at the time (Michelle Malkin and Jim Pinkerton), while two (Stephen Moore and John Fund) were — and still are — full-time employees of the Wall Street Journal, which is also owned by News Corp.

What Koch and Murdoch share in common is a brutally anti-regulatory agenda for big business, one that subjects the well-being of the everyday person to the whims of shareholders and CEOs. If what it takes to maintain the loyalty of Tea Party ground troops is a subsidized trip to D.C. to attend a fun-filled event designed as an act of race-baiting, well, then, that’s a small price to pay to further the enactment of an agenda that could reap billions for the men who are advancing it.

Adele Stan @'AlterNet'

WTF???

(Thanx Stan!)

Prosecutors may decide today on charges against WikiLeaks founder

North Korean People's Army Get Funky

RIAA: The DMCA Isn’t Working

The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) isn’t happy with the U.S. copyright law. Speaking at the Technology Policy Institute’s Aspen Forum, RIAA complained that the DMCA “isn’t working for content people at all.”“You cannot monitor all the infringements on the Internet. It’s simply not possible,” says RIAA President Cary Sherman. “We don’t have the ability to search all the places infringing content appears, such as cyberlockers like [file-hosting firm] RapidShare.”

This is true, and is one of the reasons why the Online Copyright Infringement Liability Limitation Act was passed, creating a safe harbor for online service providers. One cannot reasonably expect Google to monitor all searches, Facebook to monitor all photos, or Rapidshare to monitor all uploads, but all of these online service providers must remove infringing material should they receive a notification claiming infringement from a copyright holder.

For some time now, the RIAA has been pushing ISPs to start policing their users. “We’re working on [discussions with broadband providers], and we’d like to extend that kind of relationship–not just to ISPs, but [also to] search engines, payment processors, advertisers,” Sherman says.

Of course, YouTube disagrees with the RIAA. “It’s our view that the DMCA is functioning exactly the way Congress intended it to (…) Congress was prescient. They struck the right balance,” says Lance Kavanaugh, product counsel for YouTube.

As it is, the DMCA protects online service providers — especially smaller ones — from living in fear of lawsuits and having to spend money and resources to patrol for infringing material. The most important question, however, is whether private corporations such as ISPs (which can monitor all of your online communication) should really be responsible for figuring out who’s breaking the law.

Stan Schroeder @'Mashable'