Republican New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg blamed the SEC for the nation's financial crisis yesterday, shortly after the Boston native was done pretending to care about the Jets.

For tax evaders, the coming seven days are a time of panic, self loathing and wrenching decisions. Hanging over it all is the suicide of an apparently terrified plutocrat, reportedly wanted by the IRS for hiding a small fortune.

Hank Paulson's attempt to weasel out of an interview with the New York Times looks more comical every day. Now it's emerged that the book he was busy writing is being written by someone else.

So now a CNBC insider says GE overlords did not apply political pressure in a meeting with the network, as previously reported. The financial network is perfectly capable of flagellating itself.

Top GE and NBC Universal executives called a dinner meeting with CNBC bigwigs inside 30 Rock recently. This much is agreed upon. Still unclear: Whether CNBC was pressured to bash the president less.

Online photo service ScanCafe tells us a customer in upstate New York submitted this photo, ostensibly of Bernie Madoff, about a week ago. We were skeptical, but check out the nose and the smile.

If the president wants bankers to accept the billions of taxpayer dollars they need, he's going to have to accept their outrageous demands, like bonuses forever. Wait, what?

The New York Times has a Nobel-prize-winning economist on staff. But no such expert is in tomorrow's front-page story on the trillion-dollar financial bailout. Only the stock market's verdict is included.

After subpoenaing the names and addresses of AIG bonus recipients, New York attorney general Andrew Cuomo convinced many said recipients to return the cash. Well, many of those who live near the angry mobs.

They thought they were safe in their Connecticut palaces, but oh no: top AIG execs face death threats, angry neighbors in their driveways and tabloid photographers. Then there's the roving band of irate poors.

You know who this global economic implosion is really hurting? Broadcast networks. How can they mint money if Overlord Obama is constantly doing TV addresses, like a Soviet Secretary General?

The economic meltdown is supposed to "reenergize [the] creative economy" of New York by breaking the city's expensive obsession with finance. Instead, it's wrecking artists' best shot at wealth: Through Larry Gagosian.

It's true: Barack Obama's new logo, to be stamped on all stimulus-funded projects, is "less fascist" than the militaristic New Deal logos of the 1930s. Our Stalinist dictator must present a hippie front!

All of the government's pesky market intrusions have people snapping up copies of Atlas Shrugged like they were bailout packages. Since it's not like Ayn Rand's laissez-faire fantasies got us into this mess.

Unemployed men are supposed to be these sad, sappy wimps. That's the stereotype the infamous DABA girls riffed on. But the distinguished historians at Newsweek predict they will follow "their worst hypermasculine impulses."