Isn’t it bad enough that we’re paying for people’s bad mortgages and other costs while they’re alive?

The U.S. Treasury Department plans to extend the Troubled Asset Relief Program to certain life insurers, The Wall Street Journal reported on Tuesday, citing people familiar with the matter.

The Treasury is expected to announce within the next several days the inclusion of life insurers that are bank holding companies or own a thrift, the Journal reported on its website.

Several life insurers have applied, including Prudential Financial Inc, Hartford Financial Services Group Inc and Lincoln National Corp, the Journal reported.

Now we have to pay when they die too? All hail socialism!

It sounds like things are worse at General Motors than we all thought…

U.S. automaker General Motors Corp. (GM.N) has pulled out of its longtime sponsorship of the Academy Awards, one of the biggest annual events on broadcast television, the Wall Street Journal reported on Sunday.

When you pull out of your sponsorship of one of the biggest shows of the year, something’s up. It makes me wonder when they say “it simply doesn’t fit into our plans for 2009″. What exactly is their plan? Bankruptcy? Huh? Do they not think the Oscars are worth it any longer?

Who knows?

On this second anniversary of Hurricane Katrina’s landfall, please take a moment to remember the victims. More than 1.1 million volunteers have responded to help but more are still needed, and many homes have still not been rebuilt.

Oh sure, everyone knows about the “refugees” of Hurricane Katrina, and many of us, myself included, have our own horror stories about “non-victims” who attempted to take advantage of the system or even demanded that people “take care of them”. But I am not concerned with those people now, as they have disappeared back into the slimy little holes they crawled out of. The people I am concerned about are the real victims of Katrina. The people who took all the proper precautions and fled when they knew the storm was bearing down on them.

Since the day of the disaster, Americans have donated over 14 million hours of volunteer service to help rebuild New Orleans and the other affected areas. This has been the single biggest volunteer response to a disaster in our nation’s history, but there are still many jobs to be done, lots of work to be completed, and many people who still cannot return to their homes.

Several people I know had homes in the affected areas, and luckily most of them have been able to return or have settled elsewhere around the country, but let’s take a moment out of our day and do what we can to help. Heck, I’m not asking you to volunteer, or even donate money, I’m simply asking you to help raise awareness so others will remember as well.

Earlier today my wife discovered talkr.com.

Talkr.com is a free service which takes your text based blog and creates an audio podcast feed so visitors can listen to your posts rather than read them.

Each post on this site will have a link to listen to the post, and I will be adding a subscribe button in the sidebar as I get time.

For now, you can subscribe to the audio feed with this link (subscribe)

Pretty cool stuff if you ask me.

 
There are an estimated 170,000 people in the United States and Europe who are in need of organs. Many of them face a very dark future and may die if they don’t receive the organs they so desperately need. Over 70,000 people in the United States alone are waiting for kidneys and deceased organ donations are not keeping pace with the demand.

There is a growing need for live donations, and Matching Donors is working to fulfill that need. Matching Donors helps match those willing to donate an organ with those who are so desperately waiting to receive one.

Living donors can safely donate a single kidney, part of their liver, a single lung lobe (out of the five they have), and portions of their pancreas, bone marrow and instestines.

Take a moment out of your day to visit Matching Donors and learn about live organ donation.

It’s only been one week since the last release of Stuffr, but I thought it would be best to go ahead and release this latest version because a few people have been waiting for Stuffr to support posting excerpts.

Version 0.9.1 includes the following changes:

• Add: Added support for videos from any youtube.com domain (uk.youtube.com for example).
• Add: Stuffr now supports adding and using excerpts with your posts.
• Fix: Editing posts now pulls text after the more tag.
• Change: Saving Posts now saves the blog identity as well.
• Change: You are no longer required to pick a category. If no category is chosen, the default will be used.

What are you waiting for? Why not take your thoughts and Stuff ‘Em!

Stuffr 0.7.5 has been released. I know it’s not a “suit” issue, but it could be.

Imagine the time your employees will save if they start blogging with Stuffr.

Kooks In Suits is a team blog designed to bring you the latest information, gossip, and blunderings of “kooks” in corporate American suits.

Our site is not meant as an “attack” on corporate America, but rather as a “whistleblowing” of sorts for the kooks that run corporate America. While we will be dedicated to revealing these kooks for the dolts they really are, we will not focus on “attacking” them personally. It’s all professional. Really, it is. No, really.

Our Board of Directors is comprised of well-seasoned bloggers who may, or may not, choose to reveal their true identities. We really don’t care. Really. If they want to stay anonymous, that’s their choice. If they want to reveal themselves because you slipped them $20 under the table, so be it. We really don’t care. Really.

Why waste time focusing on the identity of our board, when we can focus on the idiocy in the business world?

We really don’t want to focus on “political” topics, but we may touch on them from time to time, because we can. If we want to. We will.

Anyway, we hope you enjoy the site. Really.