Now, here's a tough one. Who do I trust less: Nate Silver, or Pajamas Media and Glenn Reynolds?

Silver says that a bit more than 300,000 turned out for all the tea parties (link). And, he does that by linking almost 400 events in cities across the nation to local reports with their estimates of the turnout.

On the other hand, pajamasmedia.com/instapundit/76884 links to pajamasmedia.com/blog/pjtvs-crowd-estimates-for-tea-parties-still-climbing:

The estimated number of participants in yesterday’s tea parties - sent in by citizen journalists who signed up to the site to enter attendance data from the event they participated in - currently stands at more than 551,000. More than 850 ordinary Americans signed up to report on their community’s protest. The number of participants will continue to rise as more of our field observers upload their photos and videos of the events and send us their attendance figures.

But, wait, it gets even better, with pjtv.com/?cmd=tea-party headlining "US Turnout: 618,068".

In their quest to be like ACORN in every way, did the party promoters take another leaf from that far-left group's book and just start inventing people? I'll leave deciding that up to you.

UPDATE: Unfortunately, Jerome Corsi offers "1 million attend tea parties in 50 states" (link). Amy Kremer of "Tax Day Tea Party" says:

"I would estimate it at over 1 million. I'm waiting on more numbers to come in from organizers right now. I can tell you it is absolutely over 750,000 right now."

Er, OK.

And, Patrik Jonsson offers many quotes called 'Arguing the size of the "tea party" protest' (link). Those who really care might want to highlight some of those quotes and the language the reporter uses. There is one slighly interesting bit not related to the parties, however.

The original version of the article said (link):

By some estimates, over half a million Americans took to the streets last Wednesday to protest taxes and Washington spending – the largest single-day turnout of protesters in the US since 750,000 people marched in Los Angeles to protest foreign immigration on March 25, 2006. Pitched as a non-partisan protest, but dominated by conservatives and libertarians,

Obviously, that's not correct: they were there to support illegal immigration. The second version of the article says:

By some estimates, over half a million Americans took to the streets last Wednesday to protest taxes and Washington spending – the largest single-day turnout of protesters in the US since 750,000 people marched in Los Angeles in support of rights and protections for immigrants on March 25, 2006. [Editor's note: The original version misstated the purpose of the march in Los Angeles on March 25, 2006.]

They still aren't accurate, but at least they aren't saying that protest had a goal completely opposite of its real goal.