nick's blog

Wishing everyone happy holidays and a hangover-free Boxing Day.

©2008 semel17 - via flickr

It took two years and a dozen friends for David Mahfouda to make the flag that formed the circus tent for Union Square’s election-night carnival.

It only took a few hours for the largely teenaged and twentysomething crowd that gathered there to tear it to shreds for scarves and headbands.

Hours before Sen. Barack Obama make his victory speech before thousands in Chicago’s Grant Park on Nov. 4, Mahfouda took up his flag, 129 feet long and 65 feet wide, and walked, Pied Piper-like, from his apartment near the corner of Myrtle and Willoughby streets in Brooklyn. There were hours more yet to go when his following — long-haired, mohawked, clad in blazers and Converse, carrying snare drums and cymbals — arrived in Union Square to set up camp, drummers beating a steady rhythm under the billowing Old Glory.

“I initially made it because I was really distressed by how the flag has been, sort of, appropriated by the American Republican Party,” said Mahfouda, almost sheepish, crouched feet away while young people ran underneath the flag. They chanted the name of America’s first black president, cutting between the dancers and drummers who had already taken up residence underneath the red, white and blue.

“Two years ago Barack Obama was not even running for president,” he added.

Right away, this millennial-brand patriotism was branded as disrespectful. When two police officers came over to break up the drum circle, ostensibly because the noise had gone on for about an hour, one of them observed with scorn that this mammoth Old Glory had been allowed to touch the ground.

In the end, neither the noise nor the flag left the square for hours. And, of course, the kids, many of whom were New York University students, would later rip the flag to pieces. But they did it singing “The Star Spangled Banner,” chanting “yes we did!” and belting out, jubilantly, Queen’s “We Are The Champions.” No observer who stayed through the whole proceedings could say the flag was torn out of disrespect, protest, or even satire — especially strange for a generation said to be irredeemably cynical after years of too much Jon Stewart.

As part of National Novel Writing Month, I thought it might be fun to try writing a 50,000-word novel that plays with some of the emotions and ambitions evoked by the often cutthroat world of city politics.

You can't libel someone who's been dead for years. So to do a bit of character study, I've been reading the philosophizing of George Washington Plunkitt — the Tammany Hall man who first coined the term "honest graft" — and let me tell you this is classic.

Here's an excerpt from a tirade against the civil service exam, which requires appointed positions to be filled based on the results of competitive examinations:

Ever wanted to get intelligence on somebody or something, but didn't know where to start?

The Center for Investigative Reporting has a set of guides designed to help citizens and journalists (and citizen-journalists) start in on an investigation of anyone from your mayor to your noisy neighbor to your own boss.

A dead body was found with hands bound, a gunshot wound in the neck, dumped by the side of a road near the Scarsdale border in Westchester County on Sunday.
It was the second grotesquely unique corpse to turn up in Westchester in ten days. A body was found in a suitcase in Tibbets Brook Park — where I practice and play rugby — on Oct. 2.
The Journal-News reports that the first death, believed to be a drug mule from the Dominican Republic who died when he overdosed on the drugs he was transporting inside his body, does not appear related to the second one.
... Yet?

Weekly Standard editor Andrew Ferguson hates Twitter and all those who use it, apparently.

He spares some snark for a Twittering New York Times reporter's analysis of the blindingly obvious. But with a bit of stop-and-think, his lament follows a logic that perhaps he could anticipate as well.

So I'm watching Real Time with Bill Maher, and a Republican-partisan columnist from The Wall Street Journal is there with Rep. Maxine Waters, Democrat of California.

The Journal columnist just said, during a discussion over the Wall Street collapse, that Ms. Waters took $15,000 from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Ms. Waters called that one a lie and "challenged" him to find those records.

Well, OpenSecrets being just a click away, I checked. Since 2000, Ms. Waters took $7,500 from Fannie Mae in 2006 and $6,300 in 2004, according to a five-minute search of the records. A more thorough search could certainly reveal more, but that's still just shy of $14,000, not $15,000.

So in an argument between partisans where each one is calling the other a liar, the reality is they were each telling half-truths. And the politician conveniently dodged the part about how either way, she apparently did take large contributions from Fannie Mae. Typical, yeah?

File under hilarious: