A change in attitude from Krugman
Comments »Lockouts Appear to Be Increasing as a Tactic of Corporate Negotiations
“America’s unionized workers, buffeted by layoffs and stagnating wages, face another phenomenon that is increasingly throwing them on the defensive: lockouts.
From the Cooper Tire factory in Findlay, Ohio, to a country club in Southern California and sugar beet processing plants in North Dakota, employers are turning to lockouts to press their unionized workers to grant concessions after contract negotiations deadlock. Even the New York City Opera locked out its orchestra and singers for more than a week before settling the dispute last Wednesday.
Many Americans know about the highly publicized lockouts in professional sports — like last year’s 130-day lockout by the National Football League and the 161-day lockout by the National Basketball Association — but lockouts, once a rarity, have been used in less visible industries as well.
“This is a sign of increased employer militancy,” said Gary Chaison, a professor of industrial relations at Clark University. “Lockouts were once so rare they were almost unheard of. Now, not only are employers increasingly on the offensive and trying to call the shots in bargaining, but they’re backing that up with action — in the form of lockouts.”
Comments »Gasoline Prices Continue to March Higher
A Recent Poll Shows Company Growth Ahead, But Very Little Hiring
“WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Few U.S. companies plan to step up hiring in the next six months although they do expect the economy to be a bit stronger this year, according to a poll released on Monday.
The National Association for Business Economics’ industry survey found that two-thirds ofrespondents expected no change in employment at their companies over the first half of the year. That was the highest share in recent quarters.
Although the U.S. jobless rate fell to a near three-year low of 8.5 percent in December, fewer businesses said they would hire more workers, compared with the previous industry poll.
The survey, which was conducted between December 15 2011, and January 5 2012, found that 65 percent of respondents expect gross domestic product growth to exceed 2 percent between the fourth quarter of last year and the last quarter of 2012.”
Comments »America Overcomes the Debt Crisis as Britain Sinks Deeper into the Swamp
By Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, International business editor
8:33PM GMT 22 Jan 2012
Britain has sunk deeper into debt. Three years after bubble burst, the UK has barely begun to tackle the crushing burden left by Gordon Brown. The contrast with the United States is frankly shocking.
The latest report on “Debt and Deleveraging” by the McKinsey Global Institute shows that total public and private debt in the UK is still hovering at an all-time high. It has risen from 487pc to 507pc of GDP since the crisis began.
As the chart above shows, as recently as 1990 Britain’s debts were still just 220pc of GDP. Has a rich country ever been debauched so fast in peace time?
The ordeal of belt-tightening will be grim, dragging out for a generation if Japan is any guide. The Japanese at least began their post-bubble debacle as the world’s top creditor nation with a trade super-surplus and a savings rate of 17pc. Britain has no such buffers.
It is a very different picture in the US where light is emerging at the end of the tunnel. American banks, firms, and households have been chipping away at their debts, more than offsetting Washington’s double-digit deficits.
The total burden has dropped to 279pc, down from 295pc at the peak of the boom. Households have purged roughly a third of the excess, roughly tracking the historic pattern of post-bubble deleveraging.
US debt is already lower than Spain (363pc), France (346pc), or Italy (314pc), and may undercut Germany (278pc) before long — given the refusal of the European Central Bank to offset fiscal contraction with monetary stimulus.
One is tempted to ask what all the fuss was about in the US. The debt of financial institutions is just 40pc, compared to the UK (219pc), Japan (120pc), France (97pc), Germany (87pc) and Italy (76pc). Bank debt has dropped from $8 trillion to $6.1 trillion — accelerated by the Lehman collapse — as lenders rely more on old-fashioned deposits.
Tim Congdon from International Monetary Research said US banks were never as damaged as claimed and now have the highest capital ratios in over thirty years. The rate of loan write-offs has dropped from 3.2pc to 1.9pc, a faster improvement than after the financial crisis of the early 1990s.
Read the rest here.
$YUM – Taco Bell to Launch Breakfast Menu Next Week
Joe Paterno Has Died at Age 85; Read Family’s Statement Here
Full text of statement by the Paterno family on the death of Joe Paterno:
Comments »It is with great sadness that we announce that Joe Paterno passed away earlier today. His loss leaves a void in our lives that will never be filled.
He died as he lived. He fought hard until the end, stayed positive, thought only of others and constantly reminded everyone of how blessed his life had been. His ambitions were far reaching, but he never believed he had to leave this Happy Valley to achieve them. He was a man devoted to his family, his university, his players and his community.
He has been many things in his life — a soldier, scholar, mentor, coach, friend and father. To my mother he was and is her soul mate, and the last several weeks have shown the strength of their love. To his children and grandchildren he is a shining example of how to live a good, decent and honest life, a standard to which we aspire.
When he decided to forego a career in law and make coaching his vocation, his father Angelo had but one command: Make an impact.
As the last 61 years have shown, Joe made an incredible impact. That impact has been felt and appreciated by our family in the form of thousands of letters and well wishes along with countless acts of kindness from people whose lives he touched. It is evident also in the thousands of successful student athletes who have gone on to multiply that impact as they spread out across the country.
And so he leaves us with a peaceful mind, comforted by his “living legacy” of five kids, 17 grandchildren, and hundreds of young men whose lives he changed in more ways than can begin to be counted.
In lieu of flowers or gifts, the family requests that donations be made to the Special Olympics of Pennsylvania or the Penn State-THON, The Penn State IFC/Panhellenic Dance Marathon.
Subculture of ‘Mericans Prepare for Civilization’s Collapse
By Jim Forsyth
Sat Jan 21, 2012 11:44am EST
(Reuters) – When Patty Tegeler looks out the window of her home overlooking the Appalachian Mountains in southwestern Virginia, she sees trouble on the horizon.
“In an instant, anything can happen,” she told Reuters. “And I firmly believe that you have to be prepared.”
Tegeler is among a growing subculture of Americans who refer to themselves informally as “preppers.” Some are driven by a fear of imminent societal collapse, others are worried about terrorism, and many have a vague concern that an escalating series of natural disasters is leading to some type of environmental cataclysm.
They are following in the footsteps of hippies in the 1960s who set up communes to separate themselves from what they saw as a materialistic society, and the survivalists in the 1990s who were hoping to escape the dictates of what they perceived as an increasingly secular and oppressive government.
Preppers, though are, worried about no government.
Read the rest here.
Comments »UPDATE: CONFLICTING REPORTS ABOUT JOE PATERNO
FLASH: DISGRACED EX-PENN STATE FOOTBALL COACH JOE PATERNO HAS DIED
Joe Paterno, the man who for decades was synonymous with Penn State football and was known by the college football world as just “JoePa”, has died. Paterno, 85, had been receiving chemotherapy as part of his treatment for lung cancer, and complications from that treatment claimed the longtime Penn State coach’s life on Saturday.
Paterno was the head coach of Penn State for 46 seasons before being fired in November as his role in the Jerry Sandusky child sex abuse scandal came under greater scrutiny. Combined with the time he spent as an assistant, Paterno spent a total of 61 years on the Penn State sidelines. He left behind a legacy that, on the field of play, was unparalleled in Division I football. Paterno holds the all-time Division I record for football coaching wins with a 409-136-3 record, and he won two national championships while going undefeated in five different seasons.
[STATS: JoePa’s lifetime coaching record]
Under Paterno, Penn State was a perennial powerhouse, known for decades as “Linebacker U” for its propensity to develop All-American linebackers. Paterno coached such great linebackers as Dennis Onkotz, Jack Ham, Shane Conlan, LaVar Arrington, Paul Posluszny, Dan Connor, and Sean Lee, along with many others.
Additionally, running back John Cappalletti won the Heisman Trophy in 1973 under Paterno, and Cappalletti was one of seven Penn State players to win the Maxwell Award for most outstanding college football player. All in all, 68 players were named first-team All-American by at least one of the major news services under Paterno; 13 of those players were two-year winners.
Paterno’s longtime defensive coordinator and the architect of the defensive schemes that came to typify Penn State football was Jerry Sandusky, who’s now more well-known for the allegations of underaged sexual abuse against him made by men who were involved in Sandusky’s charity, The Second Mile, as boys. Sandusky is still awaiting trial for those allegations, and he pled not guilty to the charges in December 2011.
In an interview with the Washington Post released just a week before Paterno’s death, he expressed remorse for not having done more to stop Sandusky’s alleged crimes, and he also said he was “just sick about” the situation. Investigators did not bring charges against Paterno, and instead mentioned that he had fulfilled his legal obligations by notifying his superiors about an alleged assault when he was first notified in 2002.
After Paterno was fired in 2011, Penn State named Tom Bradley — who, coincidentally, was Sandusky’s replacement at defensive coordinator — interim head coach. Bradley went 1-3, including a loss to Houston in the TicketCity Bowl, and was not retained as a coach when Penn State hired Bill O’Brien in January.
Paterno was well known for encouraging his players to excel in the classroom and earn their undergraduate degrees at Penn State, and his name will live on at Penn State after his firing and death. Paterno and his wife Suewere major financial supporters of Penn State University, as they donated millions of dollars for the Paterno Library on campus, and Paterno helped establish the Paterno Liberal Arts Undergraduate Fellows Program.
Comments »OUT WITH A SHAME: Joe Paterno Reportedly on Death Bed
Joe Paterno, the legendary former coach at Penn State University, is on his death bed … this according to several reports.
A spokesman for the family says doctors have “characterized his status as serious.”
Onward State, a student-run newspaper on campus, reported Saturday he had been taken off his respirator. The Citizens Voice, a newspaper in nearby Wilkes-Barre, PA, reported Paterno’s wife Sue summoned close friends and longtime staff members toState College hospital.
TMZ reached out to Paterno’s lawyer, who would only say rumors of JoePa’s death were “not accurate.”
Paterno was the coach at Penn State for 46 years, until he was famously fired by the school last November following the sexual abuse allegations against his former assistant coach, Jerry Sandusky.
{VIDEO} President Obama Previews Tuesday’s State of the Union Speech
Jay-Z’s 40/40 Club Had 99 Problems and a Busted Fridge was Number 1
It was merely a case of bad luck that led to Jay-Z‘s 40/40 Club racking up a slew of health code violations … a rep for the club tells TMZ.
As we previously reported, the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene cited the club big time Thursday night for a litany of violations … which included several different instances of food being stored at improper temperatures.
But Ron Berkowitz, a rep for the club, tells TMZ the motor in one of the refrigeratorsblew just moments before the health inspector arrived … causing the temperature in the fridge to rise. Berkowtiz says the staff identified the problem immediately and had no intention of serving the food from that fridge.
Berkowitz says the fridge was fixed by noon the next day and the club was permitted to re-open.
He adds … the club lost no business as a result of the issue and their health code grade is currently pending review.
Comments »‘People Are Pissed’: Keystone Pipeline Sparks Labor Civil War
Some of President Barack Obama’s biggest labor supporters are fuming over his Keystone XL pipeline verdict, but they may be angrier at their labor brethren than at the president himself.
Unions representing construction workers that would directly benefit from building the pipeline feel stabbed in the back by unions that joined environmental groups to congratulate Obama for killing the project.
“People are pissed,” said one U.S. labor official who supports the proposed TransCanada pipeline. “The emotions are really, really raw right now. This is a big deal.”
“It’s repulsive, it’s disgusting and we’re not going to stand idly by,” Laborers’ International Union of North America General President Terry O’Sullivan told POLITICO. “The rules have changed. So we’ll react accordingly.”
O’Sullivan said the first move will be to pull his union out of the BlueGreen Alliance — a coalition of environmental groups and labor unions that represented nearly all of the groups that signed a joint statement backing Obama. (The BlueGreen Alliance itself did not take a position on the pipeline.)
“Unions and environmental groups that have no equity in the work have kicked our members in the teeth,” O’Sullivan said. “And anger is an understatement as to how we feel about it. We’re not sitting at the same table as people that destroy our members’ lives.”
Read the rest here.
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CBO: ‘Taken as a Whole, the Federal Tax System is Progressive’
As for all federal taxes, CBO found that in 2007 the top 1% paid an average rate of a little under 30%, compared to 15.1% for middle-income earners. In calculating this overall tax burden, CBO takes account of payroll taxes, which moves the rate of the lowest 20% of earners into positive territory at 4.7%. CBO also apportions to individuals who are shareholders the tax that corporations pay on corporate profits.
The main point is that the average effective tax rate on the richest 1% is already twice as high as that of the middle class. No matter how many times Mr. Buffett asserts it, secretaries and plumbers do not on average pay a higher tax rate or less in taxes than do CEOs. Here is what the CBO concludes: “Taken as a whole, the federal tax system is progressive.”
Comments »PETA Wants to Set Up “Meat is Murder” Museum in O.J. Simpson’s House. True Story $JPM
PETA wants O.J. Simpson’s house.
Why?
To set up a “Meat Is Murder” museum, of course.
In a letter addressed to Jamie Dimon, JPMorgan Chase’s CEO, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals asked if the bank would either donate or sell the house to the animal rights group for a “nominal sum” once the bank completes the foreclosure it’s pursuing on Simpson’s home.
Ingrid Newkirk, PETA’s president, assured Dimon in the letter that if the organization is able to acquire the five-bedroom Kendall, Fla. home, it would put it to good use by turning it into a “Meat Is Murder” museum that would teach visitors that “nonviolence begins on our plates.”
A Chase (JPM, Fortune 500) spoksesman said the bank would not comment on the matter.
PETA said it chose Simpson’s home because the former football star actively endorsed the consumption of meat. Simpson, they said, was a spokesman for a chicken restaurant chain, owned two restaurants himself and held an ownership stake in several HoneyBaked Ham stores.
The organization said it was serious about its request.
O.J. Simpson faces foreclosure in Florida
“Hope springs eternal.” said Newkirk. “We said we wanted a building in Los Angeles a couple years ago and Bob Barker came up with $4 million to buy it.”
In addition to educating visitors about the treatment of animals used for meat, the museum would offer free samples of foods made from healthy, plant-based proteins, including veggie burgers and faux chicken.
“If they say yes, we’ll be working on the menu,” said Newkirk.
Simpson is currently serving a prison sentence of up to 33 years for a 2007 armed robbery and kidnapping in Nevada. According to a source familiar with the matter, he stopped making payments on his Florida home in 2010.
In November, his attorney filed a motion to dismiss the foreclosure proceedings. But the bank is moving forward with the action, the source said. 
It Pays Big $$$ to Marry (and Divorce) Kobe Bryant
Kobe Bryant‘s wife Vanessa is the big winner in their divorce property settlement … TMZ has learned.
Sources connected to the couple and with direct knowledge of the situation tell TMZ … the property settlement agreement is signed, sealed and delivered — a done deal.
Vanessa is walking away with $75 million, which we’re told represents close to half of their total assets, estimated at around $150 million.
TMZ previously reported several transfers of property earlier this year between Kobe and Vanessa. It turns out, based on the property settlement, Vanessa scored a clean sweep, snagging ALL THREE of the former couple’s mansions in the Newport Beach area.
Vanessa gets the estate the couple was living in, the estate her mom is living in, and she gets the new estate that had been under construction for 2 years and was just completed. We were told Kobe was moving into the new estate, but that’s not true. It’s Vanessa’s crib, lock stock and barrel.
Vanessa just scored 3 … where it counts.
Hackers Strike Back at US Government #sopa
In response to government shut down of megaupload.com, hackers have flooded and taken down the following sites.
justice.gov universalmusic.com riaa.org mpaa.org copyright.gov hadopi.fr wmg.com usdoj.gov bmi.com fbi.gov
Comments »William Tecumseh Sherman’s Southern Sympathies
The Baton Rouge dinner party in early 1860 had been enjoyable, but as it went on William Tecumseh Sherman couldn’t help but hear his name mentioned repeatedly down at the table’s far end. He suspected it had something to do with his position as superintendent of the newly formed Louisiana State Seminary of Learning and Military Academy (today’s Louisiana State University). He had held the post for a few months and was well regarded by those who knew him personally, but many who didn’t were concerned that the state’s only college was run by a Northerner whose congressman brother was seen across the South as an abolitionist.
The party’s host, Gov. Thomas O. Moore, finally invited Sherman to join the discussion. “Won’t you speak your mind freely on this question of slavery, that so agitates the land?” Moore asked. “You are under my roof,” he added, “and, whatever you say, you have my protection.” His guest wouldn’t need it. Sherman is remembered today mainly as the Union general who led marches through Georgia and the Carolinas that crippled the Confederacy’s war-making capacity and demoralized its people. But that evening, surrounded by some of Louisiana’s leading citizens, Sherman would prove how Southern his views on slavery were.
Library of CongressWilliam T. Sherman“The people of Louisiana were hardly responsible for slavery, as they had inherited it,” Sherman assured his audience. Further, while the well-being of field slaves might depend on “the temper and dispositions of their masters and overseers,” Sherman thought slaves who worked in family homes were “probably better treated than any slaves on earth.” When he explained that he favored keeping slave families intact and allowing slaves to read and write in order to increase their value as property, a fellow guest pounded the table in excited support of Sherman’s remarks. A lively but congenial debate ensued that left Sherman feeling relieved, “because at the time all men in Louisiana were dreadfully excited on questions affecting their slaves.”
Sherman’s comments shouldn’t surprise us, nor the fact that they were so well received. Though born in Ohio, Sherman had spent much of his life among Southerners. In 1836 he entered West Point, where the emphasis on hierarchy and obedience would prepare Sherman well to move later among aristocratic Southerners. Upon graduation in 1840, Sherman spent the next six years at postings across the Deep South, in Florida, Alabama, Georgia and South Carolina. It was especially while in Charleston that Sherman got to know the South’s aristocracy, attending parties and going on deer hunts along the Cooper River.
Sherman resigned from the Army after a posting in California and embarked on what turned out to be a spectacularly unsuccessful business career. With the help of old Army friends, he was hired in the summer of 1859 to head the nascent Louisiana military academy.
At Governor Moore’s dinner party, in fact, Sherman had if anything actually understated his views. For one thing, Sherman was a white supremacist. “All the congresses on earth can’t make the negro anything else than what he is; he must be subject to the white man,” Sherman wrote his wife in 1860. “Two such races cannot live in harmony save as master and slave.” In a letter to his antislavery brother-in-law about plans to bring his family to Louisiana, Sherman crassly joked about becoming a slave master himself. Making light of the problems he anticipated in keeping white servants, he wrote that his wife Ellen “will have to wait on herself or buy a nigger. What will you think of that — our buying niggers?”
Blinded by his implacable racism, Sherman could see no worthwhile moral or legal debate to be had over slavery. History had forced this institution on the South, Sherman thought, and its continued prosperity depended on embracing it. “Theoretical notions of humanity and religion,” he flatly declared, “cannot shake the commercial fact that their labor is of great value and cannot be dispensed with.” Further, Sherman believed that slavery benefited both races. In 1854 he assured his brother that blacks thrived in the Southern heat and later told David F. Boyd, one of his professors at the Louisiana military academy and eventual friend, that he considered slavery in the South “the mildest and best regulated system of slavery in the world, now or heretofore.”
Still, slavery did trouble Sherman in one way: He grew increasingly worried that the political fight over it would threaten the stability of the Union. However, while he occasionally singled out Southerners for overreacting to antislavery sentiment — once writing that they “pretend to think that the northern people have nothing to do but steal niggers and preach sedition” — Sherman overall displayed a clear sympathy for their side in the growing schism. He was emphatic in an 1859 letter to his wife that the South should make its own decisions regarding slavery and then “receive its reward or doom.” Sherman thus anticipated Jefferson Davis’ famous plea of two years later that the South simply be left alone.
Despite Sherman’s strong affinities for the white aristocratic South, there were parts of Southern life that he seemed to dislike, and even despise. He enjoyed, for example, socializing in the 1840s with the better people of Charleston, but he at least once called their scions “worthless sons of broken down, proud Carolina families.” After the war, as the South struggled to rise above the devastation and impoverishment it had suffered, Sherman admonished Boyd to leave Louisiana for a teaching position in the North. “The commonest of the common schools of Iowa outrank in public estimation your university,” Sherman unkindly informed his friend, somehow overlooking that he was referring to the same college he himself had helped found and was otherwise often proud of. It’s not clear, though, how seriously to take these attacks: Sherman’s relationship with the South, like so many other areas of his life, was marked by a penchant for overheated rhetoric and a shifting array of firmly held opinions that can be hard to reconcile.
On the other hand, Sherman was always consistent when it came to the most fundamental disagreement between himself and his Southern friends and colleagues. He resigned his superintendency in January 1861 when it was clear Louisiana would follow the cotton states out of the Union. Sherman would help Southern whites “protect themselves against negroes and abolitionists,” but he refused to accept disunion under any circumstances. Sherman’s decision was painful for all concerned. “You cannot regret more than I do the necessity which deprives us of your services,” Governor Moore wrote Sherman. For his own part, Sherman told Moore he left with “the kindest feelings toward all.” At a final ceremony at the academy, Sherman bid farewell to each of his cadets individually; he then turned to the assembled faculty, but at first was unable to speak. After a moment, he placed a hand over his heart and choked out, “You are all here.”
Even so, Sherman would also hold rage in his heart at what he considered Confederate treason, and he came to embrace a war strategy to make the South pay for its disloyalty. “My aim,” according to his memoirs, “was to whip the rebels, to humble their pride, to follow them to their inmost recesses, and make them fear and dread us.” This Sherman, the scourge of the South, is well-established in Civil War history.
Much less well known, but equally essential to a proper understanding of this man, is the Sherman who wrote his oldest daughter of his sadness at fighting “some of the very families in whose houses I used to spend some happy days” and of his relief whenever battle against them could be avoided. The Sherman who received under flag of truce in 1864 a letter of thanks from several captured Louisiana students and professors for whom he’d secured release and protection. The Sherman who, a decade later in his memoirs, still recalled by name a former cadet killed in the terrible carnage at Shiloh.
Sherman’s relationship with the South makes him one of the most paradoxical and polarizing figures of the Civil War. He understood, and to a great extent embraced, the beliefs and values that led the South to secede. Yet of all Union generals he was the most viscerally opposed to the rebellion, causing him, as the war went on, to become the Confederacy’s sympathetic, vengeful enemy.
Follow Disunion at twitter.com/NYTcivilwar or join us on Facebook.
Sources: Michael Fellman, “Citizen Sherman”; Walter T. Fleming, ed., “General W.T. Sherman as College President”; M.A. DeWolfe Howe, ed., “Home Letters of General Sherman”; Rachel Sherman Thorndike, ed., “The Sherman Letters: Correspondence between General and Senator Sherman from 1837 to 1891”; William Tecumseh Sherman, “Memoirs.”
Thom Bassett is writing a novel about William Tecumseh Sherman and the burning of Columbia, S.C. in February 1865.
FLASH: Excerpts from Paula Deen’s New Health Food Cookbook
(via) (NOTE: This is satire)
Recently, Paula Deen has admitted that she’s had Type II Diabetes for years. Accordingly, she’s putting out a cookbook of healthy food. Here are some excerpts!
FRUIT SALAD
INGREDIENTS:
1 lb. bag of Skittles
3 cups ranch dressing
DIRECTIONS:
Mix well. Serve room temperature.
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PAULA’S BROWN RICE
INGREDIENTS:
1 pilaf white rice
1 bowl melted Junior Mints
DIRECTIONS:
Cover rice in chocolate. Serve with maple syrup to taste. To splurge, top with a sprinkle of sausage calzones.
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SCRAMBLED EGG WHITES
INGREDIENTS:
1 dozen (12) Cadbury eggs
2 lbs. Frito crumbs
1 package extra-fat pork lard
1 pilaf Paula’s brown rice
DIRECTIONS:
Break the Cadbury eggs and harvest the crème-filled white centers. Dip them in the Frito crumbs. Put the lard (make SURE to get the extra-fat kind or it will be BLAND) in a frying pan on high heat, and fry the crème centers until golden-brown. Serve on a bed of Paula’s brown rice.
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PAULA’S GARDEN BURGER
INGREDIENTS:
3 bags Olive Garden® Endless Breadsticks
12 Olive Garden® Stuffed Mushrooms
1 plate Olive Garden® New! Baked Pasta Romana with Chicken
4 Olive Garden® Black Tie Mousse Cakes
1 slice American cheese (optional)
DIRECTIONS:
Smash all of the Olive Garden® foods together until they resemble a large patty and top with cheese. For lowest calories, hold the cheese.
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PAULA’S GUILT-FREE FAT-FREE® SMOOTHIE
INGREDIENTS:
34 lbs. sugar
DIRECTIONS:
Put sugar in smoothie glass and drink with straw, serve chilled in white wine tumblers or, for special occasions, lap from trough. This delicacy is guilt-free since you can make a conscious choice not to feel guilty about anything you put in your body like Paula does!
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BUFFET AND A BURGER
INGREDIENTS:
1 burger
1 Las Vegas buffet
Christmas-themed elastic pants (optional)
DIRECTIONS:
Go to Las Vegas buffet. Make sure the buffet has burgers, or provide your own. Do NOT walk around the buffet. Get a motorized scooter, or stay in one spot and use a jaws of life to pick some of each buffet food out of the tubs and put it on your burger. Elastic pants are nice because your gupa (gunt-fupa) stays nicely inside the stretchy pants except for a few folds of fat with stretch marks that seep out of the pants.
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PAULA’S GUILT-FREE® PEANUT BUTTER AND JELLIES
INGREDIENTS:
1 peanut
18 sticks of butter, mashed
1 pair Jellies shoes
DIRECTIONS:
Cover the shoes with butter and top with the peanut, and then eat the shoes. If you eat shoes it’s like you’re exercising so it’s VERY healthy.
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PAULA’S GUILT-FREE® PIZZA PANTS
INGREDIENTS:
10’x20’ swath of pizza
Another pizza to use as pepperonis on the pizza
Stuffed mushrooms
FYI the mushrooms are stuffed with smaller pizzas
Smuckers magic shell ice cream topping
Rolos
Coca-cola
3 bags gummy bears
Fondue
Caesar salad dressing
Wood chips (as a thickener)
Grenadine syrup
Butter-flour mixture
Pizza Pockets
1 sewing machine
1 sewing pattern for pants (size XXXL)
DIRECTIONS:
Mushrooms are a vegetable and there are definitely some mushrooms on that pizza so technically they are HEALTHY-style pizza pants. Take the really big pizza. Put all of the other ingredients on the pizza. Pour the coke on the pizza. Dip the pizza in the fondue, and resist eating it before you make it into pants, no cheating!!! Sew that pizza into pants using the machine and the pattern. Make sure to sew in some pockets so you can keep a few extra spare Pizza Pockets in your pizza pockets!!!! Then eat your pants!!!!!!!!!!!
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PAULA’S GUILT-FREE® TURTURTURDUCKDUCKENDUCKEN
INGREDIENTS:
3 turduckens
DIRECTIONS:
Stuff a turducken in a turducken in a turducken. While you’re waiting for it to cook, make your fat niece make you some pizza pants while you’re watching Pawn Stars and eat your pants and then slap your niece.
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INSULIN AU GRATIN
INGREDIENTS:
1 insulin shot
15 lbs. block of cheddar cheese
DIRECTIONS:
Bury insulin shot in cheese. When you’re going into a diabetic coma, just eat your way to the shot!! Eat the cheese fast or you’ll die!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
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SPARKLING WATER
INGREDIENTS:
1 glass sparkling water
1 ham
DIRECTIONS:
Put ham in water.
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