Barack Obama effigies turned up Wednesday on the University of Kentucky campus and in a front yard in Indiana, as federal authorities said they weren't investigating a Sarah Palin hanging-from-a-noose Halloween display in California as a hate crime.
Kentucky school officials in Lexington were trying to determine who hung a mannequin lookalike of Obama from a tree on campus, school spokesman Carl Nathe told The Associated Press. Police took the effigy down immediately.
In Clarksville, Ind., Kirk Deddo strung an Obama doll up by a noose from a tree on his lawn and called it a Halloween decoration, saying it was the most frightening one he could find, WNDA-TV in Indiana reported.
Click here to see images of the Obama and Palin effigies.
Deddo said the effigy had nothing to do with race, and he put it up because he doesn't like Obama's stance toward the military.
"Electing Obama as president would be the scariest thing in the world," he told the station.
University of Kentucky President Lee Todd told the AP that he will apologize to the Obama family on the university's behalf because he is "personally offended and deeply embarrassed by this disgusting episode."
The Kentucky incident marks the second time this week that an effigy of the Democratic presidential candidate has been discovered on a college campus.
George Fox University in Oregon announced that it would punish four students who admitted stringing up an Obama doll from a tree on school grounds.
News of the Obama effigies came as the FBI and police in Los Angeles said they aren't treating a Palin doll dangling from a noose in West Hollywood, Calif., as a hate crime because it was part of a Halloween display.
"I'm not defending this; I'm not criticizing it. It doesn't rise to the level of hate crime," L.A. County Sheriff's spokesman Steve Whitmore told The Los Angeles Times. "Now, if there was a crime against bad taste ..."
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
Man the Obama supporters will go to any length to distract from their own atrocities...
