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A television skit that aired on the Oct. 4 edition of "Saturday Night Live," lampooning the founders of Golden West Financial Corp. and several prominent political figures, drew headlines in recent days as NBC temporarily pulled a video of the segment from its Web site and later reposted an edited version.
The sketch portrayed a fictitious C-SPAN press briefing in the aftermath of the Oct. 3 passage of the $700 billion bailout bill with President Bush, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., and House Financial Services Committee Chairman Barney Frank, D-Mass. Several minutes into the sketch, "Pelosi" introduces the characters playing Herbert and Marion Sandler, the former Golden West founders and co-CEOs, among various "victims" of the financial crisis.
"Herb Sandler," as played by Darrell Hammond, steps forward to the C-SPAN microphone and says, "My wife and I had a company which aggressively marketed subprime mortgages and then bundled them as securities to sell to banks such as Wachovia [Corp.] Today our portfolio is worth almost nothing, though at one point it was worth close to $19 billion." Pelosi then asks, "Were you able to sell it for anything?" to which Sandler responds, "Yes, for $24 billion."
"So...