Curtis Dubay on Barack Obama’s speech Thursday that reportedly decried …
… corporate inversions. That is the process whereby a U.S. business merges with a foreign business and moves the new joint business’s headquarters to the foreign country. Inversions have been a hot topic recently because well-known businesses such as Walgreens, Pfizer, and Medtronic have been looking to engage in the process.
The president, like others before him, decried this practice because he believes it displays a lack of patriotism. However, inversions have nothing to do with love of country. They are all about U.S. businesses keeping up with their global competition.
When a U.S. business inverts it continues paying the same amount of tax it always has on its U.S. income. Any business, no matter where headquartered, pays the 35 percent U.S. corporate tax rate – which is the highest corporate tax rate in the world — on income earned within our borders.
The policy causing all the problems is the extra tax the U.S. levies on the income its businesses earn in foreign countries. This is known as a worldwide tax system. The U.S. is the only industrialized country that taxes the foreign earnings of its businesses.
The worldwide system makes it difficult for U.S. businesses to compete with their international brethren because those businesses don’t face an extra layer of tax when they invest in a growing new market. The extra tax U.S. businesses face makes certain investments unattractive for U.S. businesses that remain attractive to their competitors. …
If U.S. businesses don’t do anything to remedy this disparity, their relative profitability will fall as they take a pass on more and more growth opportunities their foreign competitors eagerly chase. Eventually this would put the viability of their businesses in jeopardy.
The preferred liberal fix to this problem is to make it harder for businesses to invert by requiring foreign shareholders to own a larger portion of a merged business (50 percent compared to 20 percent under current law) before the headquarters can be moved from the U.S. This change would only make matters worse.
Business will still find ways to remain competitive, such as by selling themselves outright to foreign competition. Raising the threshold could backfire by sending the message to businesses that the U.S. tax system will remain uncompetitive and could become more hostile to investment, causing more to want to flee our shores.
The only fix for this problem is tax reform that reduces the corporate tax rate and stops taxing the foreign income of U.S. businesses. Instead of demonizing U.S. businesses that are trying to do best by their shareholders, employees, and customers, Obama would better serve the country by spending his time working with Congress to make tax reform a reality.
The first reaction of Obama’s criticizing anyone’s supposed lack of patriotism should be: Pot, meet kettle. The second reaction is that since Obama has spent his entire term in office demonizing business and the successful, it could certainly be said that the worst thing in the American economy right now is Obama’s fat mouth.
The other parallel is to businesses that move their corporate headquarters from states with bad tax or legal structures to states with business-friendly tax and legal structures. That started here with with Kimberly–Clark’s corporate headquarters move from Neenah to Dallas in the 1980s, and has continued with businesses incorporating in such states as Delaware and South Dakota.
Rep. Dale Kooyenga (R–Brookfield) pointed out last week that once the Illinois income surtax expires later this year, Illinois’ income tax rate of 3.7 percent will be half as high as Wisconsin’s highest income tax bracket, and higher than Wisconsin’s lowest tax bracket. Democrats refuse to admit that Wisconsin’s taxes are too high, but not only are Wisconsin’s corporate income taxes — some of the highest in the world when combined with the federal corporate tax rate — too high, Wisconsin’s personal income tax rates are too high too.
J.D. Tuccille sees a nation divided, and he’s got an answer neither side will like:
About two-thirds of Americans say the country is more politically divided than it was four years ago, with blame going equally to the president and Congress. Fortunately, our countrymen have a plan for addressing these divisions: they plan to vote this November, presumably to enact their vision of the good life into law and stuff it down the throats of the folks on the other side of the divide.
Maybe, just maybe, the country should be really divided a whole lot more, so that people wouldn’t have to hope “candidates they vote for will steer the country in the right direction” rather than the direction the other side wants. Bringing decision-making as far down the food chain as possible—preferably leaving most matters to individual choice—would make the current fretting over political polarization irrelevant.
Anyway, according to Rasmussen Reports, “Sixty-seven percent (67%) of Likely U.S. Voters say America is a more divided nation than it was four years ago.”
Thirty-five percent put the blame on President Obama, while 34 percent tap Republicans in Congress as the culprits for all of this terrible disagreement.
To bridge the divide, or maybe just emplace fortified bunkers at their end of it, 57 percent of all voters say they are more likely to vote this year than they have been in past elections. Republicans have the edge on enthusiasm for the ballot box (65 percent), followed by 55 percent of unaffiliated voters and 53 percent of Democrats.
Fifty-nine percent “are at least somewhat confident that the candidates they vote for will steer the country in the right direction.” That seems, at best, a problematic “solution” for dealing with disagreement over just what that direction should be.
Other polling has found that much of the public at large actually has similar positions on many major issues—that is, the political battle lines may be drawn between Red and Blue, but many Americans are a tad purplish if you ask them specifics. But that doesn’t take into account levels of enthusiasm for different solutions, or for actually participating in the hard work of changing and implement policies.
It also doesn’t mean that the stuff on which much of the public agrees necessarily consists of good ideas. Lousy choices have a strong constituency, too.
And the Pew Research Center finds that political loyalties have grown so hardened that they’ve taken on cultural aspects. Liberals and conservatives don’t just believe different things, they live differently, and apart from one another. That suggests that the divisions people perceive may well be here for the long term.
Which is all the more reason to turn them into real divisions. Forget ballot-box games of winner-take-all. Divide power as far as possible down to the level of individuals, and reduce the stakes of divisions and disagreements.
The divide isn’t just between Democrat and Republican, or conservative and liberal. I have two Facebook Friends who support opposing Republican candidates, Van Wanggaard and Jonathan Stietz, in the 21st Senate District. Having watched, from an opposite corner of the state, the bullets fly over who has the best position on Second Amendment issues, and who supports school choice more than the other, it occurs to me that each candidate’s supporters are working really hard … to get Democrat Randy Bryce elected.
It was the great disaster of the 20th century, the one that summoned or forced the disasters that would follow, from Lenin and Hitler to World War II and the Cold War. It is still, a century later, almost impossible to believe that one event, even a war, could cause such destruction, such an ending of worlds.
History still isn’t sure and can never be certain of the exact number of casualties. Christopher Clark, in The Sleepwalkers (2013), puts it at 20 million military and civilian deaths and 21 million wounded. The war unleashed Bolshevism, which brought communism, which in time would kill tens of millions more throughout the world. (In 1997, The Black Book of Communism, written by European academics, put the total number at a staggering 94 million.)
Thrones were toppled, empires undone. Western Europe lost a generation of its most educated and patriotic, its future leaders from all classes—aristocrats and tradesmen, teachers, carpenters and poets. No nation can lose a generation of such men without effect. Their loss left Europe, among other things, dumber.
Reading World War I histories, I have been startled to realize the extent to which the leaders or putative leaders of the belligerent nations personally suffered. A number of them fell apart, staggering under the pressure, as if at some point in the day-to-day they realized the true size and implications of the endeavor in which they were immersed. They seemed to come to understand, after the early hurrahs, that they were involved in the central catastrophe of the 20th century, and it was too big, too consequential, too history-making to be borne. Some would spend the years after the war insisting, sometimes at odd moments, that it wasn’t their fault.
As Miranda Carter shows in George, Nicholas and Wilhelm (2010), the king of England, the czar of Russia and the kaiser of Germany—all cousins, all grandchildren of Victoria—were all in different ways wrecked by the war.
Kaiser Wilhelm, whose bombast, peculiarities of personality and lack of wisdom did so much to bring the conflict, folded almost from the start. Two years in, he was described by those around him as a “broken man”—depressed, lethargic, ill. An aide wrote of him as “violent and unpredictable.”
Barbara Tuchman, in the classic The Guns of August (1962), notes how in the early days of the war Wilhelm’s margin notes on telegrams became “more agitated.” (“Rot!” “He lies!” “False dog!”) In time, top brass shunted him aside and viewed him as irrelevant. The kaiser rarely referred to the sufferings of his people. Ms. Carter writes: “Wilhelm had always had difficulty in empathizing with others’ difficulties.” When his country collapsed, he fled to Holland, where in conversation he referred to his countrymen as “pigs” and insisted that the war was the fault of others. He died at age 81 in 1941, two years into the World War II.
King George V did have empathy, and it almost killed him. Touring the Western Front, he suffered at the sights—once-rich fields now charred craters, villages blasted away, piles of dead bodies. He aged overnight, his beard turning almost white. Ms. Carter writes that he now surveyed the world with a “dogged, melancholic, unsmiling stare.” A year into the war, a horse he was riding on a visit to the front got frightened, reared, and fell on him. The king never fully recovered from the injuries. Years later, he was haunted by what he called “that horrible and unnecessary war.” In 1935, war clouds gathering once again, he met up with his wartime prime minister. The king, wrote Lloyd George, “broke out vehemently, ‘And I will not have another war, I will not.’ ” He also said that the Great War had not been his fault. He died the following year.
Czar Nicholas II of Russia, of course, would lose everything—his throne and his life, as his family would lose theirs. But from the early days of the war he too was buckling. His former chief minister, Vladimir Kokovtsov, called Nicholas’s faded eyes “lifeless.” In the middle of conversations, the czar lost the thread, and a simple question would reduce him to “a perfectly incomprehensible state of helplessness.”
Two years in, Kokovtsov thought Nicholas on the verge of nervous breakdown. So did the French ambassador, who wrote in the summer of 1916: “Despondency, apathy and resignation can be seen in his actions, appearance, attitudes and all the manifestations of the inner man.” The czar wore a constant, vacant smile, but glanced about nervously. Friendly warnings that the war was not being won and revolution could follow were ignored. For him, in Ms. Carter’s words, “Contradiction now constituted betrayal.” At the end, those close to Nicholas wondered if he failed to move to save his throne because he preferred a crisis that might force his abdication—and the lifting of burdens he now crushingly understood he could not sustain.
Then there is Woodrow Wilson at his second Versailles peace conference, in the spring of 1919. Negotiations were draining, occasionally volatile. The victors postured, schemed and turned on each other for gain. They had literally argued about whether windows should be opened, and about what language should be the official one of the talks. (They settled on three.) President Wilson developed insomnia and a twitch on the left side of his face. He was constantly tired, occasionally paranoid. After a trying meeting with France’s finance minister, Louis Klotz, Wilson joked with a friend of his weariness: “I have Klotz on the brain.” …
So what are we saying? Nothing beyond what I suppose has long been a theme, which may be a nice word for preoccupation, in this space: History is human.
And sometimes it turns bigger than humans can bear.
World War I was claimed to be the “war to end all wars.” World War II, 25 years later, disproved that. Historians also are coming to the view that 1919 through the mid-1930s was more a pause than peace. Certainly the peace settlement for the first war helped pave the way for the second war, though the rise (through democratic means, by the way) of Adolf Hitler had more to do with World War II.
Today in 1979, I believe I was back in Madison after nearly a month camping with my father, Boy Scouts and Scoutmaster in the Philmont Scout Ranch in New Mexico.
I know I did not watch the Yankees-Brewers game at Milwaukee County Stadium that night. The game was not on TV, because the Brewers didn’t televise home games, feeling it would hurt home attendance, until the Sportsvue subscription TV service debuted in 1984. (Sportsvue then died a year later, in large part because the Brewers chose the 1984 season to crater, just two years after their World Series season and the year after the Brewers contended almost all of the season.)
It’s too bad the Yankees-Brewers game wasn’t on TV, because, according to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel’s Gary D’Amato, it had everything, including an epic brawl:
OK, old Brewers fans, how many Brewers do you recognize? For that matter, how many Yankees do you recognize?
The Yankees back then were…well, how to describe them? Think of the team you despise most and multiply it by 10.
“I think there’s always a dislike for the Yankees,” said Sal Bando, then the Brewers’ third baseman. “Being in your own division (the American League East), I think there’s a bigger dislike for them.”
Owner George Steinbrenner was the symbol of big-city, big-spending conceit. Irascible manager Billy Martin had a perpetual chip on his shoulder. Reggie Jackson was the self-proclaimed “straw that stirs the drink,” with a home-run swing to match his enormous ego.
“They had some characters, some crazy guys on that team,” [first baseman Cecil] Cooper said. “But they had an awesome team with guys like Bucky Dent, Willie Randolph, Thurman Munson, Reggie, (Mickey) Rivers, (Lou) Piniella.”
The Brewers were coming into their own. After eight consecutive losing seasons (nine counting the franchise’s one year in Seattle), they’d gone 93-69 in 1978 and were en route to winning 95 games in ’79.
Bando and Cooper had arrived in 1977 to join Robin Yount and Don Money. Paul Molitor, Jim Gantner and Charlie Moore were ascending young players. Gorman Thomas had found a home in center field.
“We were a good team,” Bando said. “Oh, yeah, there was no question about it.”
Left-hander Mike Caldwell started the series opener. He was a bit of a character himself, known for carrying an expensive valise, in which he stored one item: a bottle of ketchup.
A crafty veteran who mixed speeds well, Caldwell already was known as the “Yankee Killer,” having shut out New York three times the year before.
“The Yankees always ruled the roost,” Caldwell said. “But I pitched extremely well against them my whole career. They had a lot of left-handers and free swingers in their lineup.”
The Yankees scored a run in the first inning, but Cooper answered in the bottom half with a two-out solo shot off starter Ed Figueroa. The homer earned Cooper a brushback pitch from Figueroa in his next at-bat, in the third.
“Figueroa was a different kind of guy,” Cooper said.
To underscore the point, when approached in the locker room after the game, Figueroa denied not only brushing back Cooper, but his own identity. “I’m not Figueroa,” he said, dismissing reporters while blow-drying his hair.
Jackson led off in the top of the fourth and Caldwell’s first pitch was high and tight and delivered the appropriate message.
“Mike was a hard-nosed, mean, grumpy kind of guy,” Cooper said. “He always stood up for his teammates.”
Jackson said nothing and worked the count to 2-2. On the next pitch, Caldwell again came inside, this time with a rising fastball that buzzed Jackson’s chin, causing the Yankees slugger to topple over backward.
“I’ll tell you exactly what happened, and it is truthful,” Caldwell said. “I wanted to throw Reggie a fastball on the inside part of the plate because he had some holes in his swing there. I was trying to telegraph to him that I was going to throw a curve and the ball slipped ever so slightly on my fingertips and I threw a fastball that was inside and it rode up on him.
“It turned into what you would call a perfect knockdown pitch.”
Jackson got up and dusted himself off. Caldwell then threw a curve and Jackson hit a towering pop-up to Bando at third.
Craziness ensued.
Caldwell moved toward Bando and was pointing to the ball and yelling, “Third!” when, out of the corner of his eye, he saw a bat coming at him. Jackson, trotting to first base, had expressed his displeasure with Caldwell’s pitch location by flipping his bat toward the mound.
“As I’m waiting for the ball, I hear the fans yelling,” Bando said. “That usually doesn’t happen with a pop-up, so I figured something was going on.”
An angry Caldwell picked up Jackson’s bat by the fat end and slammed it into the ground. Dissatisfied that it didn’t shatter, he took a step or two toward home with the intention of breaking it on the plate. Umpire John Shulock was already coming out to meet him.
“He said, ‘No, Mike, not here,’” Caldwell said.
By then, Bando had caught the ball, Jackson had rounded first and now, shedding his glasses and helmet, was rushing the mound as the dugouts emptied.
“He got his hands around my neck and if you’ve seen pictures of it, it looks like I got killed,” Caldwell said. “His momentum carried him over me and I wound up on top of him. My right arm was pinned under his neck. I had my left arm around the front of his neck and I think I tore two or three gold chains.
“Reggie said, ‘You threw at me!’ I said, ‘No, I didn’t throw at you.’ He said, ‘You swear to God? You swear to God?’ I said, ‘Hell, yeah, I swear to God.’”
It took 10 minutes to restore order but the only casualties were Shulock, who’d gotten in the way of a punch, and Brewers manager George Bamberger, who strained a calf muscle. Jackson was ejected but Caldwell was allowed to stay in the game, none the worse for wear other than a few scratches.
Martin declared that the Yankees were playing the game under protest, and when he returned to the dugout, he was pelted with a few objects and a fair amount of verbal abuse. He started climbing into the stands but was pulled back by players and security guards.
The game finally resumed and after the Yankees went ahead, 3-2, Money drove in a run and Cooper hit a two-out, two-run homer off Ron Davis in the seventh to put the Brewers back on top, 5-3.
Randolph answered in the eighth with a two-run shot off Caldwell to tie the score. Martin brought in the flame-throwing Gossage for the ninth and he quickly retired Molitor on a groundout and Money on a fly to center. Up came Cooper.
“Gossage was one of the toughest guys I ever faced,” Cooper said. “He was a big guy and he had that Fu Manchu mustache. He looked like he could take a big piece of steak and tear it in half.”
Gossage made Cooper look bad on a couple swings and ran the count to 1-2.
The next pitch, however, wound up in Brewers’ lore. Cooper turned on a fastball and the ball traced an arc in the night sky and disappeared over the right-field wall. Cooper hopped and skipped his way around the bases, the roar of “C-o-o-p!” ringing in his ears.
Bud Selig, then the Brewers’ owner and now the outgoing commissioner, called the fans’ reaction to Cooper’s game-winner the greatest he had ever seen at County Stadium.
D’Amato tells the rest of what happened in that series. (Hint: If you were a Brewers fan, you liked the other two games too.)
The 1979 season was the only year between 1976 and 1981 that the Yankees didn’t at least win the AL East. Much of the reason was the absence of Gossage, who three months earlier had broken his thumb when he fell in the Yankee Stadium shower during a fight with teammate Cliff Johnson.
Martin (whose stops as a player included, believe it or not, the Milwaukee Braves) was, well, indescribable. His record says he was one of baseball’s best managers. He had the ability to make bad teams at least competitive; until the Texas Rangers started resembling a baseball team in the 1990s, he was their manager during the Rangers’ best season, a surprise second-place finish. Martin also managed the 1969 Twins, 1972 Tigers and 1980 Athletics to division titles.
But Martin was born, or fated, or perhaps cursed, to be a Yankee. He got the Yankees to the 1976 World Series and won the 1977 World Series, despite, among other things, a televised argument in the Fenway Park dugout with the aforementioned straw who stirs the drink. He started the 1978 season as the Yankees manager before he resigned after his comments about Steinbrenner and Jackson. (Martin said the two deserved each other; “one’s a born liar and the other’s convicted.” The latter referred to Steinbrenner’s federal conviction for illegal, as in excessive, campaign contributions to the 1972 Richard Nixon presidential campaign; the former referred to, the most recent conflict between Martin and Jackson.)
Shortly after the resignation, Martin was introduced at a Yankees Old Timers Day, where the Yankees announced that Martin was going to be the Yankees’ manager in 1980, with manager Bob Lemon (who had just been hired after Steinbrenner tried to, believe it or don’t, trade Martin for Lemon) moving to a front-office position. Martin, however, replaced Lemon after the Yankees got off to a bad start in 1979, which is how Martin was in Milwaukee that night.
There was a permanent Yankee loss shortly after this. The Yankees were in Milwaukee on a road trip that ended in Chicago before the Yankees went back to New York. On a day off before the first game of their homestand, Munson, who had gone home to Ohio, decided to take his new jet out and practice takeoffs and landings. Munson’s plane crashed, and Munson died.
Martin — who, remember, was supposed to manage the Yankees in 1980, not 1979 — didn’t get to the 1980 season. He was fired after a fight in a Minneapolis hotel with a marshmallow salesman. Really. Martin returned to manage the Yankees in 1983 (the season with the infamous Pine Tar Game), 1985 (fired again after a late-season fight with pitcher Ed Whitson) and 1988 (canned again).
Martin’s career arc at any one stop was generally (1) get hired, (2) do surprisingly well with young players, (3) get in the playoffs, (4) burn out his young pitchers, then wear out his welcome with (5A) his players or (5B) management and (6) get fired. Martin was reportedly about to be hired by the Yankees again for the 1990 season, but he died in a car crash in late 1989.
On Sunday morning, many, perhaps most, of the readers of this blog spend time in the church of their choice. (And in some cases, Sunday night and Wednesday night too.)
The smallest group of people sitting around them, according to statistics, is the adult portion of the Millennial generation, those ages 14 to 34 (who are not there because their parents make them to go church). The blog-writer whose thoughts you are about to read claims that 70 percent of people raised in the Church “disengage” from their church in their 20s, and one-third of Americans younger than 30 claim no religion at all.
I suspect it’s true that a lot of the 14-to-34 set will return to church once they have children, depending on the religious views of the young mother and father. But if the one-third statistic is correct, some of those will never set foot in a church again.
There are 80 million Millennials in the U.S.—and approximately the same number of suggestions for how to bring them back to church. But most of the proposals I’ve heard fall into two camps.
The first goes something like this: The church needs to be more hip and relevant. Drop stodgy traditions. Play louder music. Hire pastors with tattoos and fauxhawks. Few come right out and advocate for this approach. But from pastoral search committees to denominational gatherings to popular conferences, a quest for relevance drives the agenda.
Others demand more fundamental change. They insist the church soften its positions on key doctrines and social issues. Our culture is secularizing. Let’s get with the times in order to attract the younger generation, they say. We must abandon supernatural beliefs and restrictive moral teachings. Christianity must “change or die.”
I think both approaches are flawed.
Chasing coolness won’t work. In my experience, churches that try to be cool end up with a pathetic facsimile of what was cool about 10 years ago. And if you’ve got a congregation of businessmen and soccer moms, donning a hip veneer will only make you laughable to the younger generation.
The second tack is worse. Not only will we end up compromising core beliefs, we will shrink our churches as well. The advocates of this approach seem to have missed what happened to mainline liberal churches over the last few decades. Adopting liberal theologies and culturally acceptable beliefs has drastically reduced their numbers while more theologically conservative churches grew. …
But adopting a shrill, combative tone only exacerbates the problem. It’s the surest way to alienate outsiders, especially Millennials. Author and historian John Dickson urges Christians to move from a posture of “admonition to mission.” Dickson lives in Australia, a decidedly post-Christian country. In our increasingly secular culture, it’s a lesson we need to take to heart. Let’s stop being shocked when our unbelieving neighbors fail to act like Christians and take a more winsome tone when we communicate the gospel.
I’ve read virtually all of the books on Millennials and the church, and I’ve added my own thoughts in Generation Ex-Christian. If there’s one lesson to take away from this corpus of literature, it’s this: intergenerational relationships are crucial. The number one predictive factor as to whether or not a young Christian will retain his or her faith is whether that person has a meaningful relationship with an older Christian.
We’re surprised when even our most ardent young people walk away, but we shouldn’t be. If they didn’t have relationships with older Christians in the congregation, in all likelihood, they’re gone. When they age out of youth group, they age out of the church. Churches must find ways to pair older Christians with teens and to engage Millennials outside the church (many of whom are starving for mentors). …
Many evangelical churches present a one-sided vision of God. We love talking about God’s love, but not his holiness. We stress his immanence, but not his transcendence. How does this affect Millennials? I like the way Millennial blogger Stephen Altrogge puts it in Untamable God.
Why are so many young people leaving the church? I don’t think it’s all that complicated. God seems irrelevant to them. They see God as existing to meet their needs and make them happy. And sure, God can make them feel good, but so can a lot of other things. Making piles of money feels good. Climbing the corporate ladder feels good. Buying a motorcycle and spending days cruising around the country feels good … if God is simply one option on a buffet, why stick with God?
Millennials have a dim view of church. They are highly skeptical of religion. Yet they are still thirsty for transcendence. But when we portray God as a cosmic buddy, we lose them (they have enough friends). When we tell them that God will give them a better marriage and family, it’s white noise (they’re delaying marriage and kids or forgoing them altogether). When we tell them they’re special, we’re merely echoing what educators, coaches, and parents have told them their whole lives. But when we present a ravishing vision of a loving and holy God, it just might get their attention and capture their hearts as well.
Today in 1958, a study by Esso (now ExxonMobil) reported that drivers drove faster and therefore waste more gas when listening to rock music.
If a driver wastes (however you define that) gas, the oil companies sell more gasoline. It’s unclear to me why the oil companies would consider that to be a bad thing, particularly in the 1950s when cars got all of 12 or so mpg.
Today in 1968, Sly and the Family Stone failed to appear at a free concert in Chicago.
A riot ensued.
Today in 1977, John Lennon did not get instant karma, but he did get a green card to become a permanent resident, five years after the federal government (that is, Richard Nixon) sought to deport him. So can you imagine who played mind games on whom?
If you think life is so strange today that only parodies make sense, then you should be happy. (Or are you tacky?)
Weird Al Yankovic has the number one album in the U.S., “Mandatory Fun.”
I determined I’m a fan of this album merely on two singles, the first which I’ve already written about: “Word Crimes.”
The second you can guess based on the lead of this blog:
Weird Al’s career dates back to the late 1970s, when as a Cal Poly student he played a version of the then-huge hit “My Sharona” …
… with, of course, an accordion:
The Knack’s lead singer, Doug Fieger, suggested to Capitol Records that it release “My Bologna.” But Weird Al probably hit the big time with …
… followed by …
In the early ’90s, Weird Al parodied Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” …
… with …
… which prompted Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain to say that he knew his band had hit it big when Weird Al was parodying them. That’s how most artists (who Yankovic always asks for permission) feel about being parodied, though not all, including Paul McCartney (who didn’t want “Live and Let Die” to become “Chicken Pot Pie”), James Blunt’s record label (even though Blunt gave the OK to have his “You’re Beautiful” become “You’re Pitiful”), Eminem (who didn’t want “Lose Yourself” to become “Couch Potato”) and Prince. (The story goes that Weird Al has asked Prince repeatedly, and been denied repeatedly. When the two were to sit in the same row for an American Music Awards, Prince’s lawyers sent a telegram demanding that Weird Al not look Prince in the eye. Note the Prince — I mean, Ƭ̵̬̊ — reference in “Word Crimes.”)
More recently, Weird Al managed to parody both a ’60s song (usually considered overwrought) and a ’90s movie at the same time:
There apparently is a movement to get Weird Al into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Weird Al isn’t. Nor are Deep Purple, Jethro Tull, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Judas Priest, and numerous others, including, most maddeningly, Chicago.
There also apparently is a movement to have Weird Al perform at halftime at a Super Bowl. (He couldn’t be worse than previous acts.) That prompted him to release …
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 