"I'm not here to make excuses," lies GE CEO Jeff Immelt in this video of a recent interview. Then he goes on to explain why your concerns about him earning $10 million last year are super stupid. Best excuses below!

So much for the truce between MSNBC and Fox. Since news of a cease fire (or at least a ratcheting down of the rhetoric) appeared in the pages of the New York Times twelve days ago, whatever fragile peace the two networks negotiated has dissolved into the usual volley of insults. Bill O'Reilly is once again the worst person in the world, according to Keith Olbermann. And MSNBC's parent company, GE, is once again responsible for supporting terrorist regimes that are hell-bent on America's destruction, according to O'Reilly. Few at MSNBC and Fox News are happy the deal has unraveled—and both sides have said they're hoping to salvage it, an unlikely prospect at this point—although some of the most annoyed people around are the NBC staffers who are getting increasingly fed up with Olbermann's antics.

• Détente? The feuding between Fox News and MSNBC has grown so fierce that News Corp.'s Rupert Murdoch and GE's Jeff Immelt met up recently "to figure out how to defuse tensions between the two channels." [LAT]
• The Boston Globe reports that two groups of investors have submitted preliminary bids to buy the newspaper from the New York Times Co. [AP]
• Breathe easy: Oprah has not been harmed. The suspicious package outside Winfrey's Harpo Studios this morning turned out to be harmless. [AP]
• All that idiocy on Lou Dobbs' part over the past couple of weeks hasn't done much to boost his ratings on CNN. His numbers continue to fall. [NYO]
• Those McKinsey consultants are paying off! Editors at Condé Nast were told yesterday they'll no longer be reimbursed for newspapers. [Daily Intel]

• Stocks appear positioned to rise this morning after tumbling to their worst levels in more than a decade during yesterday's trading session. [CNN, MW]
• More on what the government is trying to do with the billions it's been pumping into AIG. Meanwhile, the insurance giant's founder, Hank Greenberg, has filed suit against his former company and accused it of fraud. [NYT, NYP]
• Citigroup is still hoping to shed a handful of "non-core" assets, including its mortgage and insurance operations, Japanese brokerage, and private-label credit card business. [NYP]

Mr. Heidi Klum (or Seal, if you prefer) turns 46 today. General Electric chief Jeff Immelt is 53. Jonathan Lethem is turning 45. Sony CEO Howard Stringer is turning 67. New York Times finance reporter Andrew Ross Sorkin is 32. New York art critic Jerry Saltz is 58. Carolyn Maloney is turning 61. Hearst's Ellen Levine is turning 66. Novelist Siri Hustvedt is 54. NFL commissioner Roger Goodell is 50. Architect Peter Pennoyer is 52. Naked Angels artistic director Jenny Gersten is 40. Politico Norman Adler is turning 67. Phish drummer Jon Fishman is turning 44. Benicio Del Toro is 42. Justine Bateman is 43. Jeff Daniels is 54. Smokey Robinson is 69. And Haylie Duff celebrates her 24th today.

• President Obama is unveiling a $75 billion plan today to help struggling homeowners. A press conference is scheduled for 12:15pm. [WSJ, NYT, CNN]
• The Dow fell 3.8% yesterday to close at its lowest point since November. How today goes hinges on the response to Obama's housing rescue plan. [CNN]
• More on the life and times of Allen Stanford, the Texas financier who may have presided over an $8 billion fraud. [BN, NYT, WSJ]
• GM says it needs another $16 billion to stay in business. Oh, but it's still going to slash 47,000 jobs and close five plants anyway. [WSJ, NYT]
• GE's Jeff Immelt is waiving his $11.7 million bonus. [FT]
• Home construction fell a seventh straight month during January. [WSJ]
• Former CNBC anchor Ron Insana is leaving SAC Capital. [DB]
• More on Jon Winkelried's retirement from Goldman Sachs. [WSJ]

♦ Attorney General Andrew Cuomo says Citigroup should follow Goldman's lead and forgo bonuses for senior execs. [NYP]
♦ Embattled Yahoo! CEO Jerry Yang has announced he will step down as soon as the board finds a replacement. [NYT, WSJ]
♦ Mark Cuban's attorney on the insider trading charges leveled against his client: "The case has no merit, and is a product of gross abuse of prosecutorial discretion." [WSJ]
♦ Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson is unlikely to use the rest of the $700 billion bailout fund on any new initiatives, preferring to hand over the remaining pennies—and very big problems—to his successor in the Obama administration. [WSJ]
♦ Andrew Ross Sorkin on extending the bailout to GM: "Taxpayers shouldn't fork over a cent, at least until shareholders are wiped out, management is tossed out and the industry is completely reorganized." [NYT]

♦ President Bush urged Americans to support the $700 billion bailout during his televised address last night, the first time he's ever devoted a primetime speech to the economy. Meanwhile, thousands of politicians continue to clash over the specifics. [NYT]
♦ Warren Buffet was drinking a cherry coke and eating mixed nuts last Tuesday when he got a call about investing in Goldman Sachs. He hammered out the $5 billion deal in about 15 minutes and then moved on to Cheetos and "licorice pastel candies." [WSJ]
♦ WaMu may not have much time left. [Bloomberg]
♦ Lehman Brothers chief Dick Fuld reached out to GE CEO Jeff Immelt before the firm filed for bankruptcy. [NYP]

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)

Keith Olbermann may have been pushed out of his gig anchoring MSNBC's election coverage, but the Countdown host actually made out pretty well, with the cable news network widely reported to be in the process of extending his contract. Far sadder is the case of Olbermann's fellow shouting head Chris Matthews, also ejected from the election team over his on-air feuds. Matthews' contract is up in 2009, two years sooner than Olbermann's, and yet no one is talking about buttering him up! That's probably because lantern-jawed Olbermann, by far the more overtly partisan of the two, has done more to gin up ratings. But apparently it's also because parent company GE's shareholders — that is, people primarily concerned with making money off a sprawling multinational corporation and with no expertise in running media operations — were unhappy with the network's convention coverage. Report the MSNBC haters at the Post:

• More on NBC's decision to drop Keith Olbermann and Chris Matthews from covering the election on MSNBC: Olbermann got a raise out of the deal, Matthews didn't, and NBC chief Jeff Immelt may or may not have be behind the move. [P6]

• Lehman's stock price took a beating once again yesterday, this time amid chatter that Pimco and SAC Capital were pulling business from the bank. [WSJ, NYP]
  

• Esquire's editor-in-chief David Granger says he never got a call from Bill Clinton, as the former president suggested in his comments last night when he was asked to respond to the incendiary Vanity Fair story by Todd Purdum. Turns out it was a measly staff editor who emailed. [Politico]

The protégé of Jack Welch and his successor at General Electric, Immelt is the company's chairman and chief executive officer.

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]