Michael Jackson’s father insisted Thursday night that a Norwegian dancer is in fact the King of Pop’s love child.

“Yes, I knew he had another son. Yes, I did,” Joe Jackson said in an interview with NewsOne.com.

The bombshell comes a week after Omer Bhatti, 25, denied widespread reports that he was Michael Jackson’s secret son.

“He looks like a Jackson,” Joe Jackson, 80, insisted. “He acts like a Jackson, he can dance like a Jackson.”

The only real motivation that anyone at A.I.G.-F.P. now has is fear. Mr. Cuomo has threatened to “name and shame,” and his counterpart in Connecticut, Richard Blumenthal, has made similar threats — even though attorneys general are supposed to stand for due process, to conduct trials in courts and not the press.

So what am I to do? There’s no easy answer. I know that because of hard work I have benefited more than most during the economic boom and have saved enough that my family is unlikely to suffer devastating losses during the current bust. Some might argue that members of my profession have been overpaid, and I wouldn’t disagree.

That is why I have decided to donate 100 percent of the effective after-tax proceeds of my retention payment directly to organizations that are helping people who are suffering from the global downturn. This is not a tax-deduction gimmick; I simply believe that I at least deserve to dictate how my earnings are spent, and do not want to see them disappear back into the obscurity of A.I.G.’s or the federal government’s budget. Our earnings have caused such a distraction for so many from the more pressing issues our country faces, and I would like to see my share of it benefit those truly in need.

On March 16 I received a payment from A.I.G. amounting to $742,006.40, after taxes. In light of the uncertainty over the ultimate taxation and legal status of this payment, the actual amount I donate may be less — in fact, it may end up being far less if the recent House bill raising the tax on the retention payments to 90 percent stands. Once all the money is donated, you will immediately receive a list of all recipients.

The Afghan chieftain looked older than his 60-odd years, and his bearded face bore the creases of a man burdened with duties as tribal patriarch and husband to four younger women. His visitor, a CIA officer, saw an opportunity, and reached into his bag for a small gift.

Four blue pills. Viagra.

“Take one of these. You’ll love it,” the officer said. Compliments of Uncle Sam.

The enticement worked. The officer, who described the encounter, returned four days later to an enthusiastic reception. The grinning chief offered up a bonanza of information about Taliban movements and supply routes — followed by a request for more pills.

For U.S. intelligence officials, this is how some crucial battles in Afghanistan are fought and won. While the CIA has a long history of buying information with cash, the growing Taliban insurgency has prompted the use of novel incentives and creative bargaining to gain support in some of the country’s roughest neighborhoods, according to officials directly involved in such operations.

Great. Now nationalized health care is screwed.

[via.]

Citigroup is not the only bank grappling with tremendous losses. Many financial institutions are hiking customer fees at record levels.

It may be quick and easy, but that ATM convenience is going to cost you. Citibank, Chase, Bank of America and Wells Fargo are all starting to charge non-customers as much as $3 per transaction to use their machines.

“I think it’s kind of ridiculous because everybody is going through economic hardships,” New Yorker said Margo Waltz said.

. . .

Several banks are also boosting minimum account balance requirements and experts warn this is just the beginning as banks merge or go belly-up.

“The fewer banks you have the fewer choices consumers have the more a sort of gotcha the banks have,” Ludwig said.

One alternative experts are suggesting is checking out your local credit union.

“They’re not going to gouge their members because their members are the people who run the credit union,” Ludwig said.

States currently control interest rates, which are practically unlimited. Consumer advocates are calling on the Federal Reserve to step in as they did after the 1989 savings and loan bailout. They want interest rates and fees capped.

It’s estimated banks collected $17 billion in overdraft fees last year alone.

Meaning lost on me!
But for some battleground states
McCain limericks?

Or . . .

Pretentious poems,
Nugatory responses;
Your Times op-ed page!

*Don’t ask me . . .

Fans here had waited 25 years for a championship parade down Broad Street. The Phillies gave them one Friday, and so many fans showed up that they nearly shut down the city.

. . .

The parade drew fans from beyond the region, too. Greg Packer, 44, of Huntington, N.Y., drove in for Game 5 of the World Series and stayed for the celebration. He arrived on Broad Street near City Hall at 5 a.m. to secure what he considered the best spot.

“In New York right now, we have no Mets, no Yankees, no stadiums,” he said. “I came here to represent and cheer our neighbors.”

But even worse than a hack Greg Packer quote — one of zillions — is that the hack Times writer missed the true quote of the day. Lame!

Somalia’s 1,880-mile coastline is crawling with pirates, a serious problem given that so much of the country is dependent on emergency food aid, which comes mostly by ship.

The pirates are highly organized. They work in teams. There is even a pirate spokesman (who could not be reached for comment on Friday).

The Federal Reserve chairman and senior economic officials of the Bush administration solemnly filed into the large conference room of the Treasury Department. There was a sense of urgency, an understanding that drastic action — restructuring the financial landscape of corporate America — was desperately needed.

. . .

The crisis of that moment was the implosion of Enron, Global Crossing and other companies. Along with conflicts of interest and criminally creative bookkeeping, the culprit was often a combination of financial complexity and insanely expensive compensation packages.

Enron is long gone, but this episode — as much a warning for our financial security as the 1993 World Trade Center bombing was to the threat of wider terrorism — carries some telling lessons as our best minds struggle now to save the economy.

The meeting, recounted to me by Paul O’Neill, Mr. Bush’s first Treasury secretary, and several other participants, was something of a showdown. Everyone came armed for battle, none more than Mr. Greenspan and Mr. O’Neill, who railed that day like a pair of blue-suited Jeremiahs. Their colloquy on economic policy and corporate practice, which began when they were senior officials in the Ford administration, had evolved over three decades.

To the surprise of many younger men in the room, the duo opened by reminiscing about a bygone era when the value of a company’s stock was assessed by how strong a dividend was paid. It was a standard that demanded tough, tangible choices. Everything, of course, came out of the same pot of cash, from executive compensation and capital improvements to the dividend — which could be spent by a shareholder or reinvested in more company stock as a show of support.

In contrast to dividends, Mr. Greenspan intoned, “Earnings are a very dubious measure” of corporate health. “Asset values are, after all, just based on a forecast,” he said, and a chief executive can “craft” an earnings statement in misleading ways.

Speaking with a hard-edged frankness rarely heard in public — and seeing that those assembled were not sharing his outrage — Mr. Greenspan slapped the table. “There’s been too much gaming of the system,” he thundered. “Capitalism is not working! There’s been a corrupting of the system of capitalism.”

Mr. O’Neill, for his part, pushed to alter the threshold for action against chief executives from “recklessness” — where a difficult finding of willful malfeasance would be necessary for action against a corporate chief — to negligence. That is, if a company went south, the boss could face a hard-eyed appraisal from government auditors and be subject to heavy fines and other penalties. By matching upside rewards with downside consequences — a bracing idea for the corner office — Messrs. O’Neill and Greenspan hoped fear would compel the titans of business to enforce financial discipline, full public disclosure and probity down the corporate ranks.

But they were in the minority. . . .

“I define rich in other ways besides income,” he said. “Some people are wealthy and rich in their lives and their children and their ability to educate them. Others are poor if they’re billionaires.”

The implications for fiscal policy are stunning. I’m sure that the troops would be happy to be paid in cookies and warm milk after a notional McCain administration succeeds in rewriting the tax code to redistribute family happiness to those most in need.

These are not your standard security cameras; these are high resolution, night vision capability, the ability to go over great distances, many miles in fact. Some of the cameras we have in the downtown district can read the tail numbers off of airplanes miles away at the airport. These are some of the highest, state of the art cameras, that have revolution capabilities, they can move around. They can focus in and read the name off an ID badge, pretty impressive technology.

. . .

We realize they’re such powerful tools; the more we can get up, the more we can undermine crime in communities and ultimately begin to make criminals realize if the do something they’re going to get caught, either through traditional policing methods, through cameras, or some of the other things we’re deploying. Once there’s that knowledge, you begin to have people not as confident carrying a gun, or doing something illegal out in broad daylight. And what happened in New York, we talked to a lot of the criminologists involved in that effort, was it got to a point where the brazenness of criminals, gang members, drug dealers, out in the streets was so undermined, that they eventually drove a lot of the efforts to deal these drugs completely away or indoors. Driving things underground takes away a lot of the violence that’s associated with drug dealings and narcotics. And we’ve realized the majority of our shootings are narcotics related. So if you drive the narcotics trade underground, and we still have narcotics divisions that deal with major investigations, but just by getting people off street corners, and stopping narcotics folks from carrying guns because they realize there’s a high cost in doing so. Eventually we’re going to hit a tipping point in Newark where we’re not just going to see the dramatic reductions that we’re having now, but just spectacular reductions that will give residents the sense of security that they deserve.

. . .

The other thing I notice, which is a good thing, but some people just think you’re displacing crime, is a lot of the high crime areas, we’ve put up cameras. The drug dealers have just gone away. Even today I had some residents come up to me and say they were so appreciative that their neighborhood that used to be plagued by drug dealing is now a lot clearer and cleaner. The cameras really help with that. That combined with law enforcement presence and enforcement can actually eradicate the problem or drive it very underneath where it doesn’t cause the public hazards the narcotics trade often does. [Emphasis added.]

So is this a move towards home delivery? Or an acknowledgment that drug dealers will never go away, but we can get to a point where they’re safely underground (like where, a basement?)?

The Republican governor signed an executive order last week recommending the cut to minimum wage for most permanent state workers and terminating 10,133 temporary and part-time employees. He believes the state must take drastic steps to preserve cash over the next two months as the state continues to operate without a budget 36 days into the new fiscal year.

Unfortunately for that strategy, the results of past tantrums have prevented timely throwing of contemporary tantrums.

Democratic state Controller John Chiang said Monday it would take at least six months to reconfigure the state’s payroll system to issue blanket checks at the federal minimum wage of $6.55 per hour, though Schwarzenegger insists such a change should occur this month.

…

The state payroll system is based on the COBOL, or Common Business Oriented Language, programming language – a code first introduced in 1959 and popularized in the 1960s and 1970s.

“COBOL programmers are hard to come by these days,” said Fred Forrer, the Sacramento-based CEO of MGT of America, a public-sector consulting firm. “It’s certainly not a language that is taught. Oftentimes, you have to rely on retired annuitants to come back and help maintain the system until you’re able to find a replacement.”

Retired state employees who have returned to work part-time for the state were among thousands of workers laid off last week.

Forrer said the system has tens of thousands of lines of code, so it is time-consuming to find and replace salaries for each job classification on an individual basis.

California has tried to modernize its payroll system throughout the past decade, dating back to former Controller Kathleen Connell. It has faced numerous delays as state legislators have avoided investing the $177 million it now will cost.

Now I recognize that it’s possible that the Controller is playing games, but still, the only thing more brilliant than the salary reduction order was the termination of the contract programmers that the state had maintaining the system. There’s got to be a prize for something like that.

WASHINGTON — A majority of American voters say that the furor over the relationship between Senator Barack Obama and his former pastor has not affected their opinion of Mr. Obama, but a substantial number say that it could influence voters this fall should he be the Democratic presidential nominee, according to the latest New York Times/CBS News Poll.

At the same time, an overwhelming majority of voters said candidates calling for the suspension of the federal gasoline tax this summer were acting to help themselves politically, rather than to help ordinary Americans. Mr. Obama’s rival for the Democratic nomination, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, has made the suspension of the gas tax a centerpiece of her campaign in recent days.

Representative Anthony D. Weiner, Democrat of Brooklyn and Queens, drives a 2008 Chevrolet Impala, leased for $219 a month. Representative Michael R. McNulty, a Democrat from the Albany area, gets around in a 2007 Mercury Mariner hybrid, a sport utility vehicle, for $816 a month.

“It gets a little better than 25 miles a gallon,” Mr. McNulty said.

Charles B. Rangel, the chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, is not so caught up in the question of gas mileage. He leases a 2004 Cadillac DeVille for $777.54 a month. The car is 17 feet long with a 300-horsepower engine and seats five comfortably.

“It’s one of the bigger Cadillacs,” Mr. Rangel, of Harlem, said cheerfully this week. “I’ve got a desk in it. It’s like an airplane.”

Modest or more luxurious, the cars are all paid for by taxpayers. The use of a car — gas included — is one of the benefits of being a member of the House of Representatives.

There are few restrictions on what kind of car the members can choose, and there is no limit on how much they can spend. But the benefit can be politically sensitive, given the growing concerns about automobile emissions and an economy that has left many people struggling to pay for the rapidly rising cost of gas, which was averaging $3.63 a gallon nationwide earlier this week.

Not only does the federal government pick up the cost of the lease and the gas, but also general maintenance, insurance, registration fees and excess mileage charges. The perk itself may draw heightened attention in the coming weeks as members of Congress consider proposals to address gas prices, including one to suspend temporarily the federal excise tax on gasoline, 18.4 cents a gallon.

Congressional records show that about 125 members of the House make use of the benefit, which has been in place since at least the 1980s and is part of the allowance provided for their office operations. They include Representatives Charlie Melancon of Louisiana (2007 Chevy Tahoe), Bobby L. Rush of Illinois (2007 Lincoln Navigator) and Alcee L. Hastings of Florida (2006 Infiniti M45).

The Senate does not permit its members to lease cars with public money.

When he bought the Web domain pizza.com for $20 in 1994, Chris Clark never imagined it would be his meal ticket.

But yesterday, the 43-year-old Queens-born entrepreneur sold the name at auction for a saucy $2.605 million.

. . .

During the Internet’s early days, Clark ran a Web site-consulting service and bought pizza.com hoping to convince a pizzeria to do business with him.

There weren’t any takers, but he maintained the site as a pizzeria directory ever since, never imagining that his $20 investment would grow into an obscenely large pie with extra dollar signs.

. . .

In the Internet’s Wild West days, cyber-squatters snatched up corporate domain names and then sold them back to their namesakes.

But in recent years, the biggest money has been in generic domains such as business.com, which sold for $7.5 million, and vodka.com, which just sold for $3 million.

Big companies buy these domains to help direct traffic to their sites. For instance, books.com redirects to Barnes & Noble’s Web site.

Clark, who recently started a company called Minestream, which “protects children from the perils of the Internet,” said news of the sales reminded him he had been holding on to pizza.com all these years.

The 24 bidders who caused the price to skyrocket from $100 on March 27 to $2,605,000 by closing at 2 p.m. yesterday remained anonymous, as is the policy of domain-name auctioneer Sedo.com.

The winner has asked not to be identified for now.