Earlier this week we embedded the SNL vid of Saturday night's bailout sketch, later in the day (or maybe yesterday — in this news cycle who can tell) we noticed in passing that the video had gone dead. Truthfully, we just assumed that either we'd done a bad job with the code, or, alternately, that the fault lay in our sometimes challenged Moveable Type system. Turns out it wasn't our fault at all!

Per Nikki Finke:

NBC put the video online Sunday morning. But then it disappeared off the network's SNL website soon after. Needless to say, a lot of conspiracy theories were spun, real or imagined, especially by Republicans who wondered if the Democratic Congress, or perhaps Soros himself, were pulling NBC's puppet strings.

SNL labeled Herb Sandler and his wife Marion, the real-life former owners of Oakland's Golden West Financial (aka World Savings), as "people who should be shot" and accused them of predatory lending that brought down Wachovia Bank even though no charges have been filed. NBC told me just now they never received any legal threat from the Sandlers. [Though the couple did give an angry interview to The Associated Press about the SNL sketch.]

Instead, the network claimed: "Upon review, we caught certain elements in the sketch that didn't meet our standards. We took it down and made some minor changes and it will be back online soon."