See You In A Few Weeks

I will be back in a few weeks... I have some great links to the Left as well as to the Right. I will be busy tiling and getting my computer worked on, something is not working right? It probably is a combination of wrong drivers and bad RAM.

Crazy Democrats Continue the Mess!

Most of the issues that have come up in regards to the Freddie and Fannie mess were instituted by Democarts. Here is another example of the continues payoff of the Democrats and their cohorts. There is much more linked over at HotAir in regards to this post:

Creator of Freddie Mac’s Home Possible goes to FHA

Yesterday, the Obama administration announced the appointment of David Stevens to run the Federal Housing Administration (FHA). The appointment got little attention from the media, but his Senate confirmation hearing might prove more interesting. Stevens will have to explain his work for Freddie Mac in the years when the mortgage giant fueled a lending frenzy, mostly through Stevens’ own work on a program called Home Possible....

"Faith" - Gregory Koukle Speaks About True Faith versus "Faith in Faith"

This is with much thanks to The WORD on the Word Faith

Koukle co-authored a book that is in my top-thirty recommended reading near the bottom-right column. If I were to list these books not by alphabetical means but by importance, book #11 would be book #2. It is a wonderful read!

Mark Driscoll's Top-Ten Bad Theological Teachings on Suffering - First One Deals with Word Faith

This is with much thanks to The WORD on the Word Faith

Computer Should Be Unplugged Today... What Will I Do??

Michael Medved During Debate Has To Put Unruly Audience In Its Place When They Start Yelling "AIG, AIG"

Michael Medved - conservative radio talkshow host
Thom Hartmann - liberal radio talkshow host

Dodd's Wife Was Former Director of AIG-Controlled Company

We don’t expect honesty or integrity from our politicians in the United States any more, but it’s a bit shocking how corrupt the system really is—as the AIG scandal continues turning over rocks: Dodd’s Wife a Former Director of Bermuda-Based IPC Holdings, an AIG Controlled Company.

No wonder Senator Christopher Dodd (D-Conn) went wobbly last week when asked about his February amendment ratifying hundreds of millions of dollars in bonuses to executives at insurance giant AIG. Dodd has been one of the company’s favorite recipients of campaign contributions. But it turns out that Senator Dodd’s wife has also benefited from past connections to AIG as well.

From 2001-2004, Jackie Clegg Dodd served as an “outside” director of IPC Holdings, Ltd., a Bermuda-based company controlled by AIG. IPC, which provides property casualty catastrophe insurance coverage, was formed in 1993 and currently has a market cap of $1.4 billion and trades on the NASDAQ under the ticker symbol IPCR. In 2001, in addition to a public offering of 15 million shares of stock that raised $380 million, IPC raised more than $109 million through a simultaneous private placement sale of 5.6 million shares of stock to AIG - giving AIG a 20% stake in IPC. (AIG sold its 13.397 million shares in IPC in August, 2006.)

Destroy Flat-Screens - Kowtowing To the Environmental Left

We can all watch TV on an old glass tube TV while driving along in a bus splashed with flowers and a bushel of drying red peppers hangs near the walkway of the bus. HotAir h/t. I personally like the LCD screens better, however, if Arnold wants to add to the 3,000 people leaving California every day... then by all means -- outlaw plasma screens.

California has a rapidly-expanding budget shortfall, unemployment going above 10% for the first time since the early 1980s, and perhaps the worst business climate in the nation, excepting Michigan. How does the state plan to boost the economy, create jobs, and build consumer confidence? They want to ban plasma TVs because they’re not green enough:

In their continuing quest to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, state regulators have uncovered a new villain in the war on global warming: your big screen TV

Couch potatoes, beware.

The California Energy Commission is considering a proposal that would ban California retailers from selling all but the most energy-efficient televisions. Critics say the news standards could take 25 percent of televisions off the market - most of them 40 inches or larger.

“The larger the television, the more at risk it is of being banned unnecessarily in California,” said Douglas Johnson, senior director of technology police for the Consumer Electronics Association.

Association officials say the standards are not only unnecessary - because the federal government already regulates energy efficiency through the voluntary Energy Star program - but also ill-timed. The last thing our economy needs now is products taken off the market, they say.

TBN Watch - Paul Crouch Trouble

(This can also be found at The WORD on the Word Faith site)

This is a big story! At least for us that grew up with TBN in some form or fashion. I wish to give the h/t to Slaughter of the Sheep, where I saw this story first. I do not know how this will all pan out, or if it is true or not, but you don’t pay someone $425,000 for a lie. Here it is, from OC Weekly:

OH, HEAVENLY FATHER!

Did televangelist Paul Crouch Sr., founder of fervently anti-gay Trinity Broadcasting Network (TBN), secretly date a gay employee?

That’s the implication of a wrongful-termination lawsuit filed late last month in Orange County Superior Court by Brian E. Dugger, who spent 14 years as a TBN broadcasting engineer.

Déjà vu?

You may recall a 2004 Los Angeles Times revelation that Crouch denied he had homosexual tendencies but paid $425,000 to silence Enoch Lonnie Ford, another onetime male TBN employee who’d said he and the wealthy televangelist had a sexual affair.

In the latest court action, first reported by former longtime Timesman William Lobdell at his site, WilliamLobdell.com, Dugger says he met Crouch while working at the network’s Tennessee offices in the mid-’90s. The filing stops short of claiming the men slept together, but alleges that Crouch “persistently” invited Dugger, then a TBN employee in San Antonio, to “private dinners typically followed by drinks at his home.” In 2000, according to the lawsuit, the televangelist “insisted” that the men live closer. Dugger relocated from Texas to the Christian broadcasting network’s headquarters in Tustin.

If Crouch was content to associate privately with Dugger, his relatives in Southern California were apparently aghast. Shortly after Dugger’s transfer here, Jan Crouch, the elder Crouch’s wife, infamous for showcasing big hairdos and heavy black eye makeup on broadcasts, and Danny York, a TBN vice president, began pressuring him about his sexuality.

“[Dugger] was told not to dress so ‘gay’ or to wear jewelry, as it would identify him as a homosexual,” the lawsuit alleges. “Thereafter, throughout his employment, he was continuously harassed, mocked, taunted and told not to look gay.”

According to the suit, Paul Crouch Jr., who has assumed greater control over TBN operations from his father in recent years, participated in the abuse, telling Dugger he “should quit being gay and act more straight.”

The court filing details other stories:

In 2002, Junior told him that a picture on his personal website was “really gay,” that he needed to pay more attention to what “girls are into” sexually and that he should “pursue sexual relationships with women instead of men.”

The next bit is from Rick Ross’s library o’stuff, and is the original L.A. Times article... the question becomes, “where was I??”:

The time was the autumn of 1996, the scene a cabin in the San Bernardino mountains near Los Angeles. The cabin was owned by the Trinity Broadcasting Network, the world's largest televangelist organisation with outlets on satellite, cable and terrestrial channels around the world. That much we know.

According to Lonnie Ford, an admittedly troubled, sometime drug addict who worked for the station, it was also the site of an inappropriate, and potentially scandalous, sexual encounter between himself and TBN's president and founder, Paul Crouch.

For eight years, Ford has been threatening to go public with the story and has written a lengthy manuscript detailing his allegations. The two sides have been in and out of court, money has changed hands and each has accused the other of acting in bad faith.

Crouch has denied everything, as well he might, since homosexuality is a big no-no in the Christian fundamentalist world which he inhabits, and which has provided him with a lifestyle of striking lavishness over 31 years.

The star evangelist on TBN, Benny Hinn, once announced that "God will destroy the homosexual community of America ... with fire".

For eight years, TBN managed to keep the story under wraps, persuading courts to keep the relevant documents sealed and threatening Ford with legal action if he tried to break the terms of a 1998 settlement and seek a publisher for his manuscript.

That changed this month, though, when the Los Angeles Times got wind of the affair and went public with at least the gist of it. Through interviews with some of those involved, including a friend of Ford's who helped him to write the manuscript, the Times pieced together a tawdry legal history in which Ford has demanded large sums in exchange for his silence, and TBN reacted first by paying up and then by branding him a liar and extortionist.

America may be about to witness its first juicy televangelist scandal in 15 years....