Nate Silver Spells It Out.

     Nate Silver at 538.com built a stellar reputation during the 2008 presidential campaign for his savvy interpretations of statistics and polls. What do you expect from a guy who invented a system to predict the performance of major league baseball players?

     I've seen various estimates of crowd sizes at yesterday's tea parties, including video of FOX News' Neil Cavuto blatantly making shit up. Cavuto evidently can't handle the truth, as he was caught in another lie just last week, crowing about FOX News's coverage of 1995's Million Man March even though FOX News didn't exist in 1995. 

     I'll choose Silver's estimates as something resembling reality, as he has established a trustworthy track record and wasn't one of the tea party sponsors, as, you know, FOX News was:

      This is an update and probably the last one. Those of you who are interested in extending the analysis (there are undoubtedly many events missing, although most of the major ones should now be covered) are encouraged to do so at Wikipedia or elsewhere.

      But, based on news accounts of 306 "Tea Party" protests in different cities across the country yesterday, I get a cumulative attendance of 262,025, with a fair number of (probably mostly smaller) events still unaccounted for.

      These figures, wherever possible, are drawn from objective attempts to estimate crowd sizes, such as police accounts or estimates made by reporters. Organizers of these events have strong incentives to exaggerate crowd sizes. Participants in them may have some of the same incentives, and it is notoriously difficult for people to accurately estimate crowd sizes once attendance has reached more than a few dozen individuals.

      Considering that these gatherings were hyped relentlessly for weeks on FOX News and throughout the right-wing echo chamber of talk radio and conservative blogs, is that all the pissed-off white people the organizers could round up?