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Ammon News - DENVER - For the second time in a year, a billboard depicting a racist caricature of President Barack Obama has been planted on the Colorado landscape.

In the latest case, a billboard in Grand Junction depicts the country's first African-American president with not one but four caricatures, each showing him as a jihadi terrorist, a cigar-smoking gangster, a Mexican bandit in a sombrero and a flamboyant gay man.

The four caricatures are all seated around a poker game and the billboard's headline reads: "Vote DemocRAT, Join the game."

The artist, a self-described "Constitutionalist libertarian", would not reveal who commissioned and paid for the billboard, in a report by Charles Ashby of the Grand Junction Sentinel.

Last November, Colorado made headlines when another billboard depicting President Obama as a cartoonish terrorist went up in Wheat Ridge along Interstate 70.


The billboard, commissioned by a car dealer named Phil Wolf, showed two cartoonish images of Obama wearing a Muslim turban and reads "PRESIDENT or JIHAD?"

It also said "BIRTH CERTIFICATE - PROVE IT!" alluding to the conspiracy theory which claims Barack Obama was born in Kenya rather than Hawaii, which would disqualify him for the office of President.

The caricatures of Obama are seen by many as reminiscent of the anti-black images that undergirded American slavery and the Jim Crow caste system in the 19th and 20th centuries.

"Obviously, there's some racism in this," said Colorado Democratic Party Chair Pat Waak. "But this is just a reflection of the atmosphere we're in these days, an atmosphere fueled by Rush Limbaugh and other people who encourage us to demonize the other side to no end. It's never going away and it's very sad."


*KWGN-TV, Denver