Subprime Takedown

Here's the infamous SNL skit from this past weekend starring George Soros and the Herbert and Marion Sandler - who are blamed in the piece for the subprime mortgage debacle - taken down from the show's website for some reworking. If this link doesn't work, it's because NBC has made Youtube remove it - but a revised version is expected to be posted.

Michelle Malkin has a good run through on the whole episode, with speculation as to the reason for the removal.

As Todd Thurman at Heritage notes, the Sandlers are left-wing moguls who built “a
mortgage company whose major product was subprime mortgages and they sold it to Wachovia for $24.2 billion in 2006. And what do the Sandlers do when they are not peddling subprime garbage? They are busy writing checks to leftist groups like the Center for American Progress, the American Civil Liberties Union, and Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN). Yes that ACORN.”

Surprising that SNL would skewer major liberal power-brokers, and there's been speculation that they pressured the network into hiding the video.

Sandler, 77, spoke to The Associated Press in the San Francisco office of his family’s charitable foundation the morning after NBC’s “Saturday Night Live” broadcast a skit deriding the Sandlers as predatory lenders who had duped unsophisticated borrowers and Wachovia, too. A caption shown on during the sketch skewered the Sandlers as “people who should be shot.”

Although the timing of the interview was coincidental, Sandler was seething after watching a replay of the skit on the Internet.

“I have been listening to this crap for two years,” Sandler said. “We are being unfairly tarred. People have been telling us to speak out for some time, but we didn’t think it was appropriate. That was clearly a mistake.”

NBC says the skit being removed from the SNL website had nothing to do with outside pressure.

NBC's removal of the sketch without explanation Monday caused uproar among some viewers, who flooded the network with calls and e-mails, believing the sketch's right-leaning stance must have prompted the media outlet to censor its message.

But sources say the real reason for the removal was a faux C-SPAN ticker line that ran across the bottom of the screen during the skit reading "people who should be shot" and listed the Sandlers.