Stewart and Colbert WIN!

In dueling rallies, numbers count. And the numbers are now in.

The numbers are in on Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert's Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear, and it appears that a whopping 215,000 people attended the gathering Saturday on the National Mall in Washington, D.C.

The crowd estimate was supplied by AirPhotosLive.com, who was commissioned by CBS News. The company, which based the estimate on aerial pictures taken over the rally, said there is a margin of error of 10 percent.

The last time a group rallied on the national mall was this summer when Fox News commentator Glenn Beck's Restoring Honor rally drew an estimated 87,000 attendees, according to AirPhotosLive.com.

Kinda irrefutable since the same outfit surveyed each rally. (Dandy picture of the Beck rally at the link. Maybe they'll put up one of the Sanity rally alongside at some point.)

In addition, Comedy Central says that 4 million people watched online.

But still people tell porky pies.

The National Park Service is estimating that the crowds numbered “well over 200,000″. 

Forbye the fact that the blogger is correct in the number, a commenter immediately calls him or her out on the source.

Um… the National Park Service doesn’t do official estimates. It hasn’t done that for the past decade ever since the organizers of the Million Man March successfully sued them. Where did you get that obviously incorrect story from?

Last word to Faux News with a fairly anodyne report under this headline:

Stewart's Rally for 'Sanity' Draws Insane Crowd

It has garnered more than 1600 comments, most idiotic, but some sane.

And in bonus good news, the rally raised a whack of dough for some good and apolitical causes.

'Whitestock' Attendance

How many people turned out for Glen Beck's 'Whitestock' yesterday? (Go to the link for further links.)

So what was the attendence like? CBS says the rally drew 87,000, (with a stated margin of error of 9,000 either way). Attendees were tweeting 300,000, which was - coincidentally? - the number on the rally permit. Glenn Beck claimed 450,000, which will, no doubt, quickly become “up to half a million”, followed by “some say close to a million people." ...Oops! It’s already happened! The NY Times reports that “event organizers put the number of attendees at 500,000." And from the Washington Post we get this nugget of nuttiness, straight from the mouth of the Queen of Crazy herself:

Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.), speaking soon after the Beck rally at her own impromptu event nearby, said: "We're not going to let anyone get away with saying there were less than a million here today.”

More fun with numbers.