First Bishop Weeks beats up Juanita Bynum and now this? The black televangelist world took another hit today when the top Republican on the Senate Finance Committee announced that he was into six famous televangelist ministries, including the organizations run by Georgia’s Bishop Eddie Long and Creflo Dollar.

“I’m following up on complaints from the public and news coverage regarding certain practices at six ministries,” Grassley said in a statement. “The allegations involve governing boards that aren’t independent and allow generous salaries and housing allowances and amenities such as private jets and Rolls Royces.

“I don’t want to conclude that there’s a problem, but I have an obligation to donors and the taxpayers to find out more,” Grassley said.

I am far, far removed from the world of televangelist ministries, but isn’t it always sort of understood that these people are, if not outright frauds, making way, way too much money for their chosen profession and flaunting it unnecessarily? I suppose this is not the majority opinion, since millions of people send them their hard-earned cash, but this certainly seems like a worthy investigation for the government to launch.

Spike Lee is working on a James Brown movie, and at this point I think he might want to halt the process until every single wife and unclaimed child comes forward. You can’t keep adding family members into the script once it’s written.

Brown’s 73-year-old first wife has come forward, saying that she and James Brown never divorced after their 1953 marriage. According to Velma Warren Brown, they had three kids together and lived together for 17 years. If this is true, and, knowing the way James Brown handled his personal life, it surely is, some of his subsequent “wives” are going to be very unhappy.

It’s what all of the “mainstream” blogs have been waiting for — the end of Britney Spears’ first week back on the album charts. It’s probably not what her few remaining fans had hoped for — the comeback-that-wasn’t ended with her in the No. 2 position behind The Eagles, with only 290,000 albums sold. Since I can’t find the words to describe my feelings on this subject, I’ll turn to the words of 50 Cent:

“Damn homie, in high school you was the man, homie
What the fuck happened to you?”

It sort of sums everything up.

And because the top of the Billboard 200 is completely devoid of either color or soul, I hit you with the Hip Hop/R&B album charts after the jump.

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J. Holiday, best known for the song “Bed” and the fact that his album contains an above average amount of profanity for your average R&B CD, released his new video “Suffocate.” It’s devoid of profanity and perfectly SFW, in case you were wondering.

Wesley Snipes has played a badass or two in his film career, which, it should be noted, seems to be pretty much over. But in real life? He’s sort of not. He’s grasping at straws in his tax evasion trial, blaming prosecutors for being racist in their choice of venue.

In a bid to get his criminal tax evasion trial transferred from Florida to New York, Wesley Snipes claims that prosecutors “deliberately chose the most racially discriminatory venue available,” an area that the actor claims is a “hotbed of Klan activity” and where “substantial pockets of prejudice exist.” In a venue change motion filed yesterday in U.S. District Court in Ocala, Snipes claims that government lawyers are angling to get an “all-white Southern jury” to hear its case against the 45-year-old performer.

Whatever, Wesley.

Alright, alright. Knowing what I know about certain parts of Florida, I’m not going to rule out there being a small nugget of truth to his “the venue is racist” claim. But I strongly doubt the KKK is going to come get him, and I certainly don’t have it in me to either make an argument for or defend Wesley Snipes as he boohoos over getting caught for not paying his taxes. []

I certainly both understand and participate in “baby bump” speculation when it’s not 100 percent clear whether or not a star is pregnant. But at this point, with Jennifer Lopez’s belly protruding like she’s in the latter part of her second trimester, is there really a reason to keep discussing it? Were we really waiting with baited breath for some sort of confirmation on her part? I wasn’t, but apparently a lot of people were.

She announced that she is with child last night at the last show of her El Cantante tour. She said she wanted to wait until the tour was over because she didn’t want her audience to be distracted by anything while she was performing. Good thing she covered up her bump so well.

R. Kelly continues to be both a loser and a winner in my book. The loser thing is due to his penchant for young girls. The winner thing is due to the fact that he can’t lose! A judge ruled Friday that a forensic pediatrician cannot testify at R. Kelly’s trial that child abuse victims often deny that they have been abused. As we all know, the girl in the tape has consistently denied that it is her.

The doctor was to take the stand and say that underage victims of pornography often respond to the trauma by delaying a cry for help, reports the Chicago Sun-Times. However, Circuit Court Judge Vincent Gaughan said the alleged victim never has made a “delayed outcry” or any “outcry” in this case - and in fact has denied she was the child on the tape, the Times reported.

The judge will allow a medical expert to explain how she figured out that the girl in the video is underaged. A December 18th trial will determine whether the testimony of a doctor who identified Kelly in the tape from the veins in his hands will be allowed. All these pre-trial hearings are just smoke and mirrors. Why are we pretending like R.Kelly is every going to face a jury in this case? [EUR]

Michael Jackson’s back to denying that he’s anything but normal and reiterating, with cringe-inducing enthusiasm, his love for kids in the that celebrates Thriller’s 25th anniversary.

“I don’t pay attention to that,” the 49-year-old singer tells Ebony magazine. “In my opinion, it’s ignorance. It’s usually not based on fact. … Every neighborhood has the guy who you don’t see, so you gossip about him. You see those stories about him, there’s the myth that he did this or he did that. People are crazy!”

“That Michael is probably the same Michael here,” he says in the magazine’s December issue, on newsstands Monday. “I just wanted to get certain things accomplished first. But I always had this tug in the back of my head, the things I wanted to do, to raise children, have children. I’m enjoying it very much.”

Allow me to repeat the King of Pop’s words, with a slight change — “[Michael Jackson is] crazy!”

It’s a question most of us ask ourselves when his face pops up in our newspapers or on our television screens, when we hear his voice coming through our radios, when we hear his name in print. How the hell did Al Motherfuckin’ Sharpton become the voice of all black people? A fabulous opinion piece in the Washington Post* examines just that question, asserting that, in the past, most leaders — Harriet Tubman, W.E.B. DuBois, Malcolm X, and even Jesse Jackson — were required to actually lead, in some way, before they got the black leader crown. But not Rev. Al.

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Thankfully, I had left Chris Brown’s party by this time:

The Target-hosted bash went so well that the fire marshal said it had reached capacity 10 minutes before it ended. Unfortunately, that’s when rapper Jim Jones showed up with rapper Juelz Santana and an entourage of a dozen beefy buddies. We watched as Jones took it personally. “You don’t disrespect me, n-!” he yelled as he knocked down the security barricade. Santana and the entourage then bowled over the three bouncers at the door. Twelve more guys followed and a brawl ensued as they tried to pry open the door of the popular nightspot. Reinforcements from inside Tenjune swarmed out and shoved the aggressors back onto the street. Spokesmen for Jones and Santana did not return calls.

Apparently, Jim Jones lives by that old adage that the last 10 minutes of a sweaty, over-crowded party are the most fun. []