In recent weeks, General Electric and Comcast have both ceased doing business with companies in the gun trade. One media outlet thinks it knows why: Unable to get gun control from Congress, the Fortune 500 firms are working with their favorite socialist president to eliminate America's free market in guns.

Tonight, during Jon Stewart's "I Give Up!" segment, the Daily Show host discussed the news that GE paid no federal income tax for 2010, despite $14.2 billion in profits. Stewart also took aim at President Obama and NBC News.

Tonight, in a segment more fitting for 30 Rock than The Daily Show, Jon Stewart considered the problem that NBC News has because of the fact that it's owned by GE, whose products often appear in controversial news reports.

Are you ready to be entertained by a behemoth? General Electric is on the brink of selling NBC Universal to Comcast—a deal that will create one of the nation's largest entertainment companies and make everyone the same everywhere.

On Monday night, in response to a Times report alleging that Fox and NBC had brokered a deal to end his feud with Bill O'Reilly, Keith Olbermann lashed out at the world. Tonight it was O'Reilly's turn to rebel.

Friday night is for dumping embarrassing news, as media companies well know. So it is that the New York Times now surfaces a secret deal in which NBC is said to cravenly promise to ease its criticism of Fox News.

Glenn Beck and Bill O'Reilly have had it with parent companies getting involved with the content of cable news! They are talking, of course, about News Corporation General Electric.

Jeff Zucker's division made about half as much money last quarter as it did the year before. So to judge by the upward-failure arc of his career, he'll be running GE in about three weeks.

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.

Musk, apparently eager to give the magazine an exclusive and reassure buyers who must put down a sizeable $40,000 deposit for a car that they won't see until 2011 at the earliest, said that GE Capital was an investor:

Last month, shares in the New York Times Co. dropped below the $4 cost of a Sunday paper, and shares in Citibank fell below the cost of the bank's ATM fee.

CNBC personalities like Rick Santelli and Charles Gasparino have done their loudmouthed best to hone the financial network's laissez-faire bonafides. Good luck holding that stance if CNBC's troubled parent company seeks a bailout.

Who's the newest Six Sigma expert? Tina Fey. The cultish quality process observed by her employer, NBC Universal, is a predictable source of profitable laughs for her show, 30 Rock and all too real.

What did the CEO of General Electric say about black people two weeks ago? The Black Corporate Directors Conference may have thought it was doing Jeff Immelt a favor by keeping his comments on race off the record, thus allowing him to speak more freely and so forth. But now that Immelt's statements to CNN's Soledad O'Brien and other conference panelists are the subject of damaging gossip, the hush-hush arrangement is keeping O'Brien and others from publicly denying anything. And that, fairly or unfairly, just lends the rumors more credence. Here's what a tipster told Jossip about Immelt's remarks:

Scheduled to take the stage at Google's latest Zeitgeist gathering are CEO Eric Schmidt and General Electric CEO Jeff Immelt. The plan is to announce a partnership which "is likely to focus on adding network intelligence to the electric grid and improving capacity," according to Portfolio. The idea is to improve electricity-infrastructure efficiency through more advanced networking technology, presumably resulting in better service and lower carbon-dioxide pollution by reducing demand through conservation and therefore burning less coal. Of course, for now it just means more lobbyists in the Capitol and possibly more money for research and development. What does Google want in all this, besides good environmental press?GE owns vast rights of way for the electrical grid, which could potentially aid Google's efforts to build their own Internet backbone infrastructure — even over the transmission lines themselves. And of course, less demand for electricity combined with stable supply means cheaper juice for Google's giant datacenters. The real question is, what's in this for Immelt and GE? (Photos by AP/Phelan M. Ebenhack, Mark Lennihan)

As the CEO of a publicly traded company, Time Warner CEO Jeffrey Bewkes is, as he protested to Portfolio's Lloyd Grove, obligated to consider strategic acquisitions as they become available. So he had to say, when Grove asked, that he'd consider buying NBC Universal if GE decided to spin off the media company. But he didn't have to so mildly rebuke speculation he was "intrigued" by such a deal, or go on at such length about the possibility:

Forget HTC's Android-running Dream, expected out this October. General Electric has brought the Googlephone to life. GE's Digital Enhanced Cordless Telecommunications, or DECT, version 6.0, has a handy built-in Goog-411 button, to spare users the burden of dialing 1-800-GOOG-411. It's already on store shelves for $60.

Doddering General Electric and water-logged Carnival Cruises both outgrew Yahoo last year. GE did it despite selling "23 times as much stuff" as Yahoo last year, according to the Wall Street Journal's Dennis Berman. Despite this, Wall Street grants Yahoo a generous 37.43 price-to-earnings ratio. Berman thinks Yahoo's board should "strike as the iron is hot" and holds up the precipitous downfall of AOL — it's worth about half its 2005 $20 billion valuation — as an example of a path Yahoo should not follow. [WSJ]

NBC Universal CEO Jeff Zucker again denied rumors of a possible sale of the company by parent General Electric. Zucker noted that GE chief Jeff Immelt "has said numerous times that NBCU is not for sale." Sort of like NBC's new fall season on iTunes. [Reuters]