Outside directors of ExxonMobil are among the highest-paid board members in the world. Each earned well over $300,000 in compensation from the giant oil company in 2006.

And that’s only part of the story.

Because of ExxonMobil’s strong stock, if the directors’ 2007 compensation were calculated based on today’s share prices, it would total about $500,000 apiece.

That may be one reason why ExxonMobil changed its non-employee director pay last week, reducing the annual award of restricted stock from 4,000 shares to 2,500 shares apiece, beginning next year. The company also increased cash payments to each director to $100,000 from $75,000, while eliminating smaller payments for some committee duties.

Billionaire Ron Burkle has a new crash pad in New York, complete with a heated swimming pool and a panic room.

Burkle, one of former President Bill Clinton’s best friends, has purchased a swank Manhattan apartment for a whopping $17.5 million, plus nearly $100,000 a year in maintenance fees. Burkle already owns the lavish Green Acres estate in Beverly Hills, where frequent Democratic fundraisers are held.

The three-level apartment with 5 bedrooms and 5.5 bathrooms doesn’t have a doorman and is situated in a fairly uninteresting part of lower Manhattan.

The Smithsonian Institution, without a permanent chief since former secretary Lawrence Small resigned under a cloud earlier this year, is now being criticized for failing to maintain its buildings and protect its collections.

The Government Accountability Office issued a report yesterday saying the backlog of necessary construction at the Smithsonian has increased to $2.5 billion, mainly because the institution has sought federal funds rather than allocating private donations to the projects.

Hunt Oil’s controversial production-sharing deal with Kurdistan is “legally uncertain” and has “needlessly elevated tensions” between the Kurds and the central Iraqi government, a senior State Department official in Baghdad told The New York Times.

Dallas-based Hunt Oil is run by Ray Hunt, a close friend and advisor of president Bush.

Execs from Google and Microsoft are scheduled to appear before the Senate today to argue the merits of Google’s proposed acquisition of DoubleClick.

Google announced the $3.1 billion deal in April, but the plan requires approval of the Federal Trade Commission and regulators abroad.

At first glance, the business plan hatched by Raffaello Follieri and his father, Pasquale, would make lemonade from lemons.

The Italian father and son founded the Follieri Group in 2003 to purchase underused Catholic Church properties in the United States.

Follieri, a member of Legatus, the Catholic organization of CEOs, told the National Catholic Reporter that two trends sparked the company’s interest in church-owned real estate. American dioceses, in financial crisis because of the widespread sex abuse scandals, were forced to sell holdings to pay lawsuit settlements. And the church’s shifting demographics, with Catholics moving out of the cities, left many empty churches and schools in urban areas.

Members of the International Peace Operations Association will have plenty to talk about at their October summit in Washington.

The trade group with the Orwellian name is an association of private military contractors, including besieged Blackwater USA, which faces investigations abroad and at home.

The association was formed in 2001, and has grown rapidly with the increased use of private contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan. Its mission is to “promote high operational and ethical standards of firms active in the peace and stability industry.” One of its stated aims is to combat the perception that its members are war profiteers.

The New York Times is backing down - somewhat - on a controversial ad placed by the liberal advocacy group MoveOn.org that infuriated conservatives.

Under the headline “General Petraeus or General Betray Us?” the full-page ad contended that the American commander in Iraq was “constantly at war with the facts” in giving upbeat assessments of progress and refusing to acknowledge that Iraq is “mired in an unwinnable religious civil war … Today, before Congress and before the American people, General Petraeus is likely to become General Betray Us.”

The first family of Dallas is not named Perot, or Cuban, or Jones or Hicks.

And it won’t be Bush when the president leaves the White House in 2009 and returns to Big D.

The first family of Dallas is Hunt.

It has been ever since Haroldson Lafayette Hunt moved his oil company to the city in the 1930s so he could be closer to his banker and good train service.

It’s even truer today because of Ray Hunt, the most powerful Hunt - and there have been a lot of them - since old H.L. While H.L. was always trying to find a U.S. president who would listen to him, his son has found one in George Bush.

Netscape founder and serial entrepreneur Marc Andreessen has no empathy for attorney William Lerach and his former firm Milberg Weiss, ensnared in a decades-long conspiracy scheme that paid kickbacks to the firmís clients.

“Lerach and his equally appalling — and increasingly equally indicted — colleagues at a quote-unquote law firm called Milberg Weiss terrorized the high-tech industry for over a decade, filing baseless lawsuit after baseless lawsuit,” Andreessen wrote in his blog last week after Lerach pleaded guilty.