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Patrik Jonsson at the Christian Science Monitor looks at numbers in an interesting way:

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.]

Pitched as a non-partisan protest, but dominated by conservatives and libertarians, the national Tea Party protests took place in over 800 locales – from mega-city Atlanta to little Craig, Colo. – with people waving mostly homemade signs, chanting "USA! USA!" and recalling the spirit of the country’s revolutionary roots to demand smaller, more responsible and more constitutional government.

Critics doubt the higher estimates of the turnout, and say the numbers represent the extreme right rather than a burgeoning political counterpoint to President Obama and current Washington policies.

Yet the idea of non-traditional protesters using bottom-up organizing to foment a national movement in the span of 60 days may have marked a turning point for the tea partiers – especially since the high attendance estimates rivaled the estimated 500,000 or so protesters who converged on New York City and several other major cities to oppose the Iraq War on Feb. 15, 2003.

Crowd estimates seem to be all over the place and the further that we get away from Teabagapalooza the more they seem to grow until, eventually, conservatives will claim that more than "a bajillion times infinity patriots" showed up. But, giving them the benefit of the doubt and saying that 400,000 showed up to protest big government, taxes, bailouts, the New Obama Order, gravity, and words that sound like other words but aren’t the same thing, I would be much more impressed if it didn’t take them a combined 800 cities to generate slightly more than half the crowd that the immigration amnesty protests drew in LA alone.

If I were a Republican I would be more concerned with the Big Brown Wave and less with the Frothing White Teabaggers.