General Electric investors may have a sense of deja vu heading into Thursday’s special presentation on GE Capital. Last December, as the credit freeze impaired everyone from Wall Street firms to Main Street banks, GE managers held a similar meeting to address the impact on GE’s finance unit.
Few had cared about how GE Capital made money when it drove company profits, but during a lending crisis what was inside the black box suddenly mattered very much.

Investors learned that their bluechip industrial company was a big player in consumer credit cards and commercial real estate, had exposure to UK subprime mortgages, and owned more than $50 billion in off-balance sheet, asset-backed securities.

Three months later the stock is down 40%. The company lost its AAA credit rating, once referred to as “the gold standard” and “sacred” by managers; and it slashed its dividend.

The questions about GE Capital’s books remain, and have even grown to include doubts about the company’s book of business in Eastern Europe and Russia, as well its loan loss reserves.

Today GE’s chief financial officer Keith Sherin, GE Capital chief executive Mike Neal and GE Capital managers will, in the words of Sherin, “do a deep dive around the hot spots” including real estate, U.S. consumer credit, UK home lending, and central and eastern Europe exposure. They will show that GE Capital will make money in the first quarter and put to rest loss reserve fears by explaining their balance sheet stress tests.

The meeting space at 30 Rockefeller Plaza will be full to capacity and investors left in the cold are tuning into the webcast. For those who can’t listen in, we’re blogging it from across the street with comments coming at us from in the room. Refresh here throughout the morning for more news. And feel free to comment and email me with thoughts at kbenner@fortunemail.com if you’re listening along, too or have thoughts on GE Capital.

Click here for the morning session and here for the afternoon.

Two thoughts ran through my head as I read a column by my most excellent colleague Geoffrey Colvin called Don’t go gaga over Google. The first, given that Geoff’s piece was all about why shares of Google (GOOG) are in no way worth more than $500, is that it would have been at least sporting to have mentioned that we are the magazine that not quite three years ago asked, on our cover, if Google really was worth, wait for it, $165 per share.

I’m not enough of a student of economic value added, or EVA, analysis that Geoff deploys in his piece to judge how conclusive his argument is. I’m also not sure how closely professional managers follow this method. I’d love to know confessed-Google-lover Bill Miller’s thoughts on the subject. Actually, I’m not really commenting one way or the other on the valuation. Not now, anyway. All great companies fetch a premium that defies any rational analysis — until they don’t. Witness Microsoft (MSFT), whose stock grew until 2001 and hasn’t since, and General Electric (GE), which, as the one and only Nelson Schwartz reminded us this past weekend, still hasn’t recovered its 2000 high. (Actually, Geoff Colvin wrote that story too, in 2005. But now I really digress.) In essence, Google’s valuation will remain tied more to its ability to grow than its return on capital. That’s my opinion, for what it’s worth.

Which leads to my second thought, regarding a line near the end of Geoff’s column that journalists often refer to as the “to be sure” line, as in “To be sure, Mr. Smith accomplished much in his career …” Geoff writes:

Irrational valuations can last a long time, and sometimes they correct gently rather than violently. And it doesn’t mean that Google is poorly run. On the contrary, it has been brilliantly run. (emphasis added.)

That’s a fascinating point, because here in Silicon Valley there’s absolutely no consensus that Google has been brilliantly run. There’s no question that Google has brilliantly exploited a massive opportunity in the online advertising market, primarily search-based text ads. No one can ever deny that.

Whether the company is well run, however, simply can’t be known yet. As I pointed out in my own cover story last year, Google so far has been able to avoid answering the question of whether its chaotic nature is by design or whether it’s merely holding onto the handles of one incredibly fast roller-coaster ride. Its young founders are universally believed to be really bright guys. But they’ve never worked anywhere else. They condone, nay, encourage, a permissive culture that lets engineers run wild whether or not they are contributing to the bottom line. Its CEO, Eric Schmidt, was a top scientist at Sun Microsystems (SUNW) and then an uneventful CEO of a relatively unimportant Novell (NOVL). The line on Schmidt is that he has grown tremendously in the job at Google. That’s undoubtedly true. Still, he hasn’t been tested by the kind of adversity that knocks CEOs on their backs. And to judge by one data point, Google’s surprising inability to manage its hiring costs, Schmidt hardly has the place running like a finely-tuned engine.

To be sure, Google already is a company for the ages. Its stock may surge even more. The greatness of its management, however, will be judged far more in the next three years than in the last three since it went public.

In an important ruling yesterday, which you may have already seen reported in either the New York Times (here) or the Wall Street Journal (here), the federal appeals court in New York rebuffed and invalidated the Federal Communications Commission’s attempt to crack down on dirty words on broadcast television. But what you might not have heard about yet was the subtle judicial exegesis (contained in footnote 18 of the dissenting opinion) on the distinction in legal status between the F-word and the S-word.

Incidentally, I am using the demure-to-the-point-of-nauseating phrases “S-word” and “F-word” because my earlier feature story about this case (entitled “Bleep Deprivation,” and published in the March 19 issue of Fortune) stirred some internal controversy at the time with some of our partners and affiliates, because it used the actual, unexpurgated Anglo-Saxon expletives at issue. That story is now available here. (Alternatively, you can see what it looked like in the magazine (with graphics) by following these instructions: click here for the digital version of that whole issue; then click on the magazine photo; then click on the window where it says “C1 of 233″; when the window goes blank, type in “53,” which is the page number of the story; then click “enter.”) (For FCC chairman Kevin Martin’s unprintable reply to the ruling, try here .)

In any event, in yesterday’s ruling, in Fox Television Stations v. FCC, two of the three judges on the appeals panel decided that the FCC had acted “arbitrarily and capriciously” when, in 2004, it did an abrupt about-face in longstanding policy and discarded its so-called “isolated and fleeting expletives doctrine.” Under that doctrine, the FCC had, until then, essentially given broadcasters of live TV a free pass if someone unexpectedly ran off the reservation and used one or two expletives in isolation. Beginning in early 2004, however, after Bono used the F-word in accepting a Golden Globe award on a live broadcast on Fox Television Stations – a unit of News Corp. (NWS) – the FCC decided to crack down and begin imposing a one-strike-you’re-out rule. It later also applied the new rule to two similar incidents on the Billboard Music Awards, which were being broadcast live by NBC, a unit of General Electric (GE). (Viacom (VIA) also intervened in the case; It is still challenging, in a federal appeals court in Philadelphia, the fine levied against it for the Janet Jackson incident during Super Bowl XXXVIII, which was broadcast on CBS (CBS) and produced by MTV.)

The two judges in the majority, Judges Rosemary Pooler and Peter Hall, said the FCC had failed to articulate a reasonable basis for the shift in policy. They also strongly hinted that the FCC should not waste its breath trying to provide a more convincing statement of reasons now since, in all likelihood, the policy it tried to enforce would probably be unconstitutionally vague in any event.

The third judge on the panel, Pierre Leval, dissented. Interestingly enough, however, he did so only as to the F-word. He felt that while the FCC had adequately justified its decision to regulate even a single use of that word, he agreed with his colleagues that such draconian regulation of the S-word would probably violate the law and, possibly, the constitution. He reasoned that back in 1976, when the U.S. Supreme Court first upheld the federal law that purports to outlaw indecency in radio and TV broadcasts, it emphasized “the accessibility of broadcasting to children.” Judge Leval then continued: “The potential for harm to children resulting from indecent broadcasting was clearly a major concern justifying the censorship scheme. In this regard, it seems to me there is an enormous difference between the censorship of references to sex and censorship of references to excrement. For children, excrement is a main preoccupation of their early years. There is surely no thought that children are harmed by hearing references to excrement.”

Though this is just a dissenting opinion of course, even dissents can become influential over the years if they have persuasive force. So tell me readers and parents, given children’s “preoccupation” with excrement, should the regulation of fleeting and isolated references to “s–t” be unconstitutional?

It’s taken me 15 years to get comfortable with that joke. In my second job out of college I was the Washington correspondent for a fine trade publication called Plastics News. I joined shortly after the weekly started, and it’s still alive and thriving. It was my crash course in business journalism as well as my introduction to lobbying and policy issues. At the time the plastics industry was frantically trying to avoid regulation by promoting recycling. All the major producers and users like Dow (DOW), DuPont (DD), Procter & Gamble (PG) and McDonald’s (MCD) were involved in the debates. I wrote about garbage long before Marc Gunther got interested.

Anyway, I’m ruminating on this now because plastics are as relevant as ever, even if General Electric (GE) is getting out of the business it pioneered. GE, in fact, scored a victory by selling the unit for $11.6 billion, far more than the $8 billion or so Wall Street had originally expected. The buyer is the Saudi company Sabic. An interesting side note is that GE early on said it wouldn’t entertain offers from “clubs” of private equity firms. In the end, a buyout fund didn’t get the prize. The New York Times published some interesting history about the unit, which dates to 1930. I’d forgotten that Jack Welch and Jeffrey Immelt, GE’s previous and current CEOs, worked at the plastics division.

Elsewhere this week, investment firms Cerberus and Oaktree Capital (each is in the news themselves for other reasons recently — click on the links) sold their investment in Formica, the historic laminate company that I frankly didn’t know still existed.

That’s the thing about plastic: It just doesn’t go away.

Some good stats out today from at outifit named Lux Research on the bubble aborning in green-tech investing. (Bubbles aren’t necessarily a bad thing, by the way, as a new book by my pal Daniel Gross argues.) Lux counts 930 energy startups in the world today, and firm president Matthew Nordan says “there’s no way that more than a fraction … can possibly succeed.” I made similar bubbleicious observations recently in a Fortune column.

Some other nuggets:

* There were $2.04 billion in green venture capital investments in 2006, about half again as much as the total invested since 1995.

* Just a few investments from VCs (think: Khosla Ventures, Kleiner Perkins, VantagePoint, etc.) account for a disproportionate share of the investments: the top 10% of investments have soaked up 39% of the cumulative VC capital deployed.

* “Major print media” mentioned green investing 3,485 times in 2006, representing 70% increases for each of the last two years.

If you read carefully, you’re starting to see a bit of a backlash on all things green, and not necessarily only from the Al Gore-hating rightwing media. Kurt Andersen penned a savvy piece in New York recently called So We’re Green. Now What? Yesterday’s New York Times also ran a thoughtful article in the Week in Review section on the limitations of carbon offsets. It also used the wish-washy headline-writing technique (see above) of asking a question: Carbon-Neutral Is Hip, but is it Green? Brandweek reports that Honda (HMC), a clever marketer, is pulling back on its Environmentology advertising campaign.

The point here isn’t that environmentalism is a crock. Just that merely driving a Prius or planting a tree doesn’t all by itself help the environment that much. Neither does owning shares of First Solar (FSLR), because it is one of the few green-tech success stories so far, or General Electric (GE), because it’s investing heavily in wind power. (Some interesting tidbits on First Solar, by the way, in this article by the one and only Carol Loomis.) And with every bubble comes a backlash. Watch for it.