The leader of a Black Lives Matter chapter in Pasadena, California, was convicted this week on a felony charge that was known as “lynching” until recently, for her alleged role in a confrontation with police last year. Governor Jerry Brown signed legislation changing the law’s name after a different black activist was charged with lynching last year.

Student activists at Lebanon Valley College are asking the school to change the name of Lynch Hall because of its racial connotations, even though it is named for a former school president who had nothing to do with lynchings. One suggestion: “Maybe they should file a complaint with Attorney General Loretta Lynch.”

California prosecutors dropped lynching charges today against 20-year-old Black Lives Matter activist Maile Mae Hampton, the Guardian reports. In January, Hampton was accused of interfering with the arrest of another activist.

The CEO of economy-wrecking greed-disaster AIG compares criticism of the bonuses collected by his bailed-out derivatives jockeys to "hangman nooses....what we did in the Deep South. And I think it was just as bad and just as wrong." Lynchings and criticizing bankers: equally wrong.

Normally it takes at least three of something to make a trend, but given that the trend in question is the mock-lynching of an American president, waiting around for a third instance seems unnecessary.

A Texas-based political blog brings news of a North Austin man who shocked some in his neighborhood by putting up a display in his front yard apparently meant to symbolize a lynched President Obama hanging from a tree.

Former political person Sarah Palin, who's still performing her role as occasional whackadoodle on Fox News, went on last night to discuss the tragic case of former Penn State assistant football coach Jerry Sandusky allegedly raping young boys for decades. She had a nuanced reaction to the whole affair, specifically that Jerry Sandusky should be lynched.

This is a video of Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney telling an audience in New Hampshire on Wednesday that Republicans are "going to hang" Barack Obama—and then immediately catching himself. So you see: Romney only wants to hang Obama metaphorically. Which is, sad to say, a good thing, insofar as it's uhm, nice (?) to see a prominent Republican use racially problematic language by mistake, and not in a deliberate, cynical pandering strategy. And he actually seemed pretty embarrassed! Mitt Romney 2012: Not a Completely Cynical Scumbag. [via TPM]

Yesterday, a tipster sent us this photo that a friend had taken at a Manhattan Baby Gap store near Union Square. If we didn't know better, we'd say that Baby Gap is now in the lynching business.

Jeffrey Lord of the conservative American Spectator has some "breaking news": Shirley Sherrod's story about her relative's "lynching" is false, and she is a liar. There, it's settled. Except that Jeffrey Lord doesn't know what "lynching" means.

Gothamist.com, the NYC news-about-town blog, today posted a straightforward item about a 19-year-old woman who was raped in her apartment building in Soho last night. They described the suspect: "a black man, about 5'8" and 200 pounds, with a possibly pockmarked face, and he may be between 20-30 years old." Now, we were under the impression that Gothamist's readers are mainly drawn from the broad hipster demographic. So either our impression is way off, or many hipsters are thinly-veiled racist fucks (somewhat true, actually). Because the comments quickly turned into a call to throw black men off buildings: