Are hanging chairs lynching Obama
Chairs evoke racist executions of African-Americans, rather than Clint Eastwood joke
If a chair with the president's name on it hangs by a rope from a tree, does it represent murder?
That's the debate raging in America where anti-Obama campaigners say their garden furniture is an innocent reference to Clint Eastwood's famous "empty chair" rant at the Republican National Convention - not a symbolic lynching of America's first African-American president.
A white plastic chair suspended above a yard in Camas, Washington, is the latest exhibit. Like the others before it in Austin, Texas, and Centreville, Virginia, the chair is marked "Nobama".
Next to it, a large chalkboard says: "Are you better off now than four years ago? The king is a joke."
Critics have said the so-called chair lynchings are an obvious reference to the nation's ugly history of mob executions targeting African-Americans; the chair-stringers reply they are a humorous take on Eastwood's address to President Barack Obama, represented by an empty chair.
In the case of George and Kathryn Maxwell in Camas, the chair was initially on the ground - but kept getting knocked over.
"The reason we hung it up was because people kept stealing it. We just have to take extra precautions," Kathryn Maxwell said.