I don't want to waste too much more internets talking about the tea-party, just wanted pass on a couple of thoughts. First, from the incomparably civil Steve Benen, this:

We learned today that right-wing activists don't like government spending (except when Bush and Republican lawmakers spent freely), don't like the size of government (except when Bush and Republican lawmakers increased the size of government), don't like deficits and debt (except when Bush and Republican lawmakers added trillions to the nation's tab), and don't like czars (except when Bush used dozens of them to implement his agenda).

They don't like health-care reform, though it's not clear why. They don't like gun control, though it's not clear why they think anyone's coming for their firearms. They also don't like taxes, immigration, abortion, Muslims, the U.N., and the idea of "socialism," though their understanding of the word is tenuous at best.

In other words, the point of today's rally was to let the country know there are a lot of right-wing activists with right-wing beliefs. We knew that before today, but I guess they wanted to remind us.

No-one seems to be able to agree on how many people turned up, but Fox News, while excitedly talking up the occasion, went with "tens of thousands". So let's be generous and say 80,000 people were there.

Now cast your mind back 14 years, to when Louis Farrakhan held his party in the capital. I recall the endless nonsense about how many people had in fact turned up, but let's go with the independent estimates that put the figure around 400,000.

So, taking the high, non-independent estimate of the tea-party, and the low, indepedent estimate of the Farrakhan thingie, the tea-partiers were outnumbered 5:1. That's as generous an estimate as we can give to the tea partiers.

Would it be unfair therefore to argue that the tea partiers are less popular and thus by definition more extremist than the Nation of Islam?