All the squawking in the world and all the pretty little anchorwomen trying to add spice to shouters and wankers like Jim Cramer and Larry Kudlow aren't helping CNBC. The business network's audience is dropping faster than last year's stock market. Its October audience is down 50 percent compared with last October, according to Nielsen.

Is it time for another Rick Santelli rant? (Click above for a rerun.) Kiss-ass "biographies" of businesses and people with "passion" (like Sam Walton) aren't working.

Of course, just about every channel is down from last October's panic that drove everyone to subject themselves to cable 24/7 no matter how bad it was for their brains. (See the ratings roundup here.)

Unsurprising bad news for Barack Obama's futile and childish war against Fox News: The channel is still No. 1 by a way huge amount.

Sometimes, like in the case of David Letterman, hubris is a good thing. At least Letterman hasn't caused the economy to crash, as those hubristic Wall Street goniffs's egos did.

For a successful extortion, see the case of Nevada Senator John Ensign, whose tit-for-tat deal with an aide went like this: Ensign fucked the aide's wife. When that became public, the aide quit. Then Ensign pulled strings to set the aide up in a great lobbying gig. The aide knew exactly what was happening: a quim pro quo deal.

David Letterman made the right business decision last night, although not necessarily the correct one, when the $30-million-a-year TV host exposed an alleged extortion attempt in front of astonished and immediately sympathetic viewers on his TV show. A person tried to blackmail Letterman — he says — because he screwed female staffers.

Several good screwings deserved another, the alleged extortionist (who supposedly threatened to write a screenplay) must have thought, if the story's true.

Letterman didn't do what could have been the correct thing: Pay the money. The guy does, after all, make at least that $30 million a year — even more than the Yankees' Alex Rodriguez, and Letterman's much more lovable.

On the other hand, once you pay a blackmailer, the extortion may never stop. Just ask Michael Jackson — if you pry him off little boys wherever he is now.

Instead, Letterman did the smart thing. The only possibly bad decision Letterman made was to have sex with staffers, any one of whom could have written a tell-all, unless he arranged a nondisclosure agreement, which he probably didn't. That's what you get when you foul your own nest instead of going elsewhere for your poontang.

In a business sense, Letterman handled it brilliantly. Fucking employees (unless they're fellow execs) is standard business practice, whether or not sex is involved. But this was the smartest bailout in at least the past year, and Letterman did it himself, with no boost from taxpayers. He used the alleged extortion attempt as a shtick on his show last night. He wound up admitting that he fucked staffers. He garnered really high ratings during a sweep period, making his bosses deliriously happy because their franchise is also intact. He told his audience: "I want to reiterate how terrifying this moment was . . . was I going to get a tap on the shoulder? I am motivated by nothing but guilt." And he earned admiring headlines, like "Letterman creates brilliant hour of TV from woes."

Beautiful. Bill Clinton should have done the same thing, instead of lying about having sex with "that woman."

It sounds a little goofy, but Disney's purchase of the Marvel Comics mega-merchandising empire makes perfect business sense. Disney's buying 5,000 characters for $4 billion in cash and stock.

The WSJ wonders whether that's a "superhuman price." But it's the Disneyfication that's worrisome. Walt's old company is the very definition of bland. And Marvel? As the N.Y. Times puts it, "Marvel's intellectual property tends to be more popular with boys."

Do reporters have to write like lawyers? If those comic book characters are intellectual property, then Hannah Montana is Kierkegaard.

Thanks to good stuff from Dealbreaker's Bess Levin and the Daily News's Dave Goldiner, we may know too much about Bernie Madoff's sex life with secretaries (as they were called when he was banging them). The fact is that Madoff still did his best work on his older co-religionists.

Brad Garrett somehow puts it all in perspective in the Comedy Central Roast of Joan Rivers, when he cracks, "Joan has fucked more old Jews than Bernie Madoff."