One thing we’ve learned about James von Brunn is that he was apparentely a ‘birther’, one of these folks who claims that Barack Obama is not the legitimate president of the United States because he is not a natural born US citizen (this is all the ‘where’s the birth certificate’ nonsense).

The great majority of the people who’re into this stuff are just harmless wingers and nutballs. But this stuff has clearly also permeated the extremist fringe. We’ll be putting more up on this soon. But this is clearly of a piece with rising right-wing extremism and fringe violence that — uncomfortably as it is to say — is rising in tandem in the early months of the Obama presidency.