"Two billion people at Stewart-Colbert rally"

Joel Achenbach understands new media:

...When in doubt, go with the most hysterical headline.

(Rule one of blogging is that the End Of The World will be good for page views.)
-World War Five

Which we trotted out for our intro to "Oil spill: Even worse worst-case scenarios! (BP)".

From the Washington Post:

Everyone calls it "The Rally." No further explanation needed. All my friends and neighbors are going, and I may just have to go too as a trustworthy crowd estimator and Sheryl Crow reviewer. I just got off the phone with a friend who is on one of 200 buses from New York City rented by HuffPo to carry people to the Stewart-Colbert rally. Extrapolating from that figure I can estimate the crowd size at 2 billion people, plus or minus 200 million. But this is a tentative number not yet subjected to peer review. Also I am sitting on my porch at this precise second....MORE

Since the Raison d'être of this blog is money, here's the Christian Science Monitor:

Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear raises big money. Who gets it?

Saturday's Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear, organized by Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, has raised hundreds of thousands dollars without selling a single ticket. Where's the money going?

While it’s still not clear how seriously to take the now-hybridized Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear, the events have raised a serious amount of money already – and their organizers aren't keeping it....MORE

[Spoiler Alert: no conspiracy, just a couple good causes -ed]