This article is over 1 year old 
 
 No one noticed state flag, ranked among the most poorly designed in US, was hoisted incorrectly for over a week, prompting local lawmaker’s push for redesign 
 
 Nebraska needs new flag after flying it upside down for 10 days, politician says 
 
 A state senator campaigning for the Nebraska flag to be redesigned has revealed the banner was displayed upside down for 10 days before anyone noticed. 
 
 Burke Harr, who represents the eighth district in Omaha, said the flag had been hoisted incorrectly on top of the Nebraska state capitol building. 
 
 “It took someone drawing it to my attention before it was changed,” Harr told the Nebraska state executive board on Monday, according to the Omaha World Herald. 
 
 Harr said the fact no one was able to tell that the Nebraska flag was upside down showed that the banner was ready for reform. He is sponsoring a resolution which would see the flag redesigned. 
 
 The current flag is essentially just the Nebraska state seal plonked on to a royal blue background. Critics have said the flag is crowded and hard to recognize. 
 
 Facebook Twitter Pinterest Maryland’s state flag was ranked the worst on the website Thrillist. Nebraska was 49th. Photograph: Alamy Stock Photo 
 
 It depicts a blacksmith with a hammer, a steamboat on a river, a steam train chugging past some mountains, some trees, a little house, and the Nebraska state motto: “Equality before the law.” These items are enclosed in a double-ringed gold circle, which bears the words “Great seal of the state of Nebraska” and the date 1 March 1867. 
 
 “That’s fine for a state seal,” Harr said, “but a flag needs to be instantly identifiable.” 
 
 The Nebraska flag has consistently been ranked among the worst designed of the US flags. 
 
 Ted Kaye, who wrote a book on flag design called Good Flag, Bad Flag, put the flag bottom in his list of flags. 
 
 “Try identifying this flag when it’s up on a pole and flapping in the wind,” Kaye said to CNN, referring to the Nebraska state standard. Given the 10 days the flag spent upside down, it seems people might struggle. 
 
 The website Thrillist ranked the Nebraska flag 49th out of 50 states. (Maryland’s was ranked worst.) 
 
 Facebook Twitter Pinterest New Mexico’s state flag, among the best. Photograph: selensergen/Getty Images/iStockphoto 
 
 “You don’t draw a guy in a robe trying to smash through a tree stump, you just don’t,” Thrillist wrote, apparently referring to the blacksmith shown on the flag. 
 
 In 2001 the North American Vexillogical Association ranked Nebraska’s flag as the 49th-poorest of all 50 states, and as the 71st-worst (out of 72) “subnational and territorial flags” in the US and Canada. NAVA found that Georgia had the worst flag. The state subsequently updated its flag in 2003. 
 
 Kaye wrote that a good flag “should be so simple that a child can draw it from memory”, should “never use writing of any kind or an organization’s seal” and should “be distinctive”. The Nebraska flag would appear to fail on all counts. 
 
 One problem is that there are quite a lot of state flags which feature some sort of symbol on a blue background. Montana, Kansas, South Dakota and Minnesota, which Kaye ranked 49th, 48th, 47th and 46th respectively, all share that design. 
 
 His favorite flag is New Mexico’s yellow and red pennant, which Kaye said recalled the state’s Spanish and Native American heritage, while he also praised the Texas and Arizona flags. ||||| A flag flown by a group of Florida Democrats has created quite a flap. 
 
 The Lake County Democratic Party took down an American flag that displayed President Barack Obama’s face in place of the stars after some local veterans who took umbrage at the banner showed up at the party’s office and demanded its removal. 
 
 The standoff started after local veterans circulated photos of the flag, which flew below a standard Stars and Stripes outside the party’s headquarters in Tavares, about 45 miles northwest of Orlando. 
 
 “It’s absolutely disrespectful,” Jim Bradford, a local veteran who helped to organize the protest, told Fox News. “What really upsets me is that the flag had apparently been flying for months and no one had done anything about it.” 
 
 Flags similar to the Obama flag the veterans objected to are available for about $26 on eBay. 
 
 About a half dozen veterans arrived Tuesday at the party’s headquarters, where they were greeted at the door by Nancy Hurlbert, the county Democratic chair. 
 
 Hurlbert offered to research the matter, but did not immediately agree to take down the flag. 
 
 “You’re in violation of the code,” veteran Donald Van Beck told her in a video of the encounter released by the Orlando Sentinel. 
 
 “And I’m saying I will check it out,” answered Hurlbert, who declined Van Beck’s offer to take down the flag and reminded the veterans they were on private property. 
 
 While federal law encourages respect for the flag and sets forth standards for its use, altering the flag carries no criminal penalties. 
 
 “There’s no question there’s a First Amendment right to alter a flag,” Steven H. Shiffrin, a professor and First Amendment scholar at Cornell Law School, told the Daily News. “But the fact that something’s legal does not make it politically smart.” 
 
 Hurlbert later removed the controversial banner, saying she had researched the matter and took responsibility. 
 
 “We’re proud of our President, and we didn’t realize it was in violation,” she told the Sentinel. 
 
 Lake County may be rough political terrain for President Obama regardless of the flag flareup. Though Obama carried the Sunshine State in the 2008 presidential election, Sen. John McCain, his GOP opponent, won Lake County, with 56% of the vote to 43% for Obama. ||||| JACKSON, Miss. (AP) — A top Mississippi lawmaker said Monday that the Confederate battle emblem is offensive and needs to be removed from the state flag. 
 
 House Speaker Philip Gunn became the first top-tier Republican to call for a change in the flag, which has had the Confederate symbol in the upper left corner since Reconstruction. 
 
 "We must always remember our past, but that does not mean we must let it define us," Gunn, a leader in his local Baptist church, said in a statement. "As a Christian, I believe our state's flag has become a point of offense that needs to be removed. We need to begin having conversations about changing Mississippi's flag." 
 
 Mississippi and Tennessee officials are grappling with whether to retain Old South symbols, even as South Carolina leaders are pushing to remove a Confederate battle flag that flies outside the statehouse there. 
 
 Mississippi voters decided by a 2-to-1 margin in 2001 to keep the state flag that has been used since 1894. It features the Confederate battle emblem — a blue X with 13 stars, over a red field. 
 
 Republican Gov. Phil Bryant on Monday repeated his long-held position that the state should keep the flag as is. 
 
 "A vast majority of Mississippians voted to keep the state's flag, and I don't believe the Mississippi Legislature will act to supersede the will of the people on this issue," Bryant said in a statement. 
 
 Democratic Sen. Kenny Wayne Jones of Canton, chairman of the Legislative Black Caucus, said the Confederate emblem is a "symbol of hatred" often associated with racial violence. Jones said the flag represents the power structure's resistance to change during the 1960s and '70s, when civil rights activists were pushing to dismantle segregation and expand voting rights. 
 
 "We should be constantly re-examining these types of stereotypes that label our state for what it used to be a long time ago," Jones told The Associated Press. 
 
 At the Tennessee Capitol in Nashville, a bust of Nathan Bedford Forrest, a Confederate general and an early Ku Klux Klan leader, has sat in an alcove outside the Senate chamber for decades. 
 
 Democratic and Republican leaders are calling for the bust to be removed. Craig Fitzhugh, the state House Democratic leader, said it should go to the archives or a museum and be replaced in the Capitol by a statue of Lois DeBerry, an African-American who became the first female speaker pro tempore of the Tennessee House. Women and minorities are underrepresented in government symbols, Fitzhugh wrote. 
 
 "We need to revisit what we have displayed in the Capitol so that it better represents a Tennessee for all of us," he wrote Monday. 
 
 Since the 2001 Mississippi election, bills that proposed changing the flag have gained no traction, with legislators saying voters settled the issue. 
 
 The massacre of nine worshippers at a black church in South Carolina last week renewed public debate about the Confederate battle flag. The white suspect, Dylann Storm Roof, appeared in photos holding the banner. 
 
 Russell Moore, a Mississippi native who serves as president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention, wrote in his blog Friday that the Confederate flag — including the emblem on the Mississippi state flag — should be retired. He said its connection with the "great evil" of slavery makes it incompatible with Christianity. 
 
 "White Christians ought to think about what that flag says to our African-American brothers and sisters in Christ, especially in the aftermath of yet another act of white supremacist terrorism against them," Moore wrote. "The gospel frees us from scrapping for our 'heritage' at the expense of others." 
 
 ____ 
 
 Galofaro reported from Louisville, Kentucky.
– Time to change Nebraska's flag? That's what some are saying after the banner flew upside down over the state Capitol for 10 long days, the Omaha World-Herald reports. "Nobody noticed it," says state Sen. Burke Harr. "It took someone drawing it to my attention." Now Harr is calling for a task force to redesign the flag, which shows a busy state seal "plonked" against a royal blue background, per the Guardian. It includes a steamboat, a train, and a blacksmith pounding away with a hammer, plus the state motto, "Equality before the law." It's not the first time the state symbol has been ridiculed. The North American Vexillological Association ranks it among the five worst state flags, and Thrillist ruled that only Maryland's was uglier. "You don’t draw a guy in a robe trying to smash through a tree stump, you just don’t," the site chided. When it comes to terrible state flags, there's apparently a race to the bottom. The good ones are "far outnumbered by the terrible ones," the author of Good Flag, Bad Flag once told CNN. A bid in 2002 to change the flag fell flat, but now Nebraskans appear ready for a makeover. An ad exec who designed the state's 150th anniversary logo as a stylized ear of corn emphasizes the need for simplicity. "It's galling" the flag "doesn't embody" the "uniqueness" that is Nebraska, adds the director of the state's art council. (Flying a flag upside down can send an unintentional message, as Facebook found out.)