The malady of inflated attendance numbers for Saturday's anti-Obama protest continues to spread throughout the conservative media world. A Sept. 14 CNSNews.com article by Fred Lucas states:

Adam Brandon, spokesman for Freedom Works Foundation, one of the main sponsors of the event, estimated the crowd at 150,000. But on Sunday, the group's Web site estimated that hundreds of thousands of people turned out.

In fact, the closest thing to an official estimate comes from the Washington, D.C., fire department, which reported a turnout of 60,000 to 70,000. But Lucas didn't report that -- or the fact that FreedomWorks already has a record of making false assertions about turnout numbers. ABC traced a claim that it had reported that more than 1 million attended the rally -- ABC reported no such thing -- to FreedomWorks president Matt Kibbe.

Lucas later uncritically noted that “High Caliber, a conservative rapper,” said, “I've done tea parties for 500 people. But not 500,000 or whatever it is we've got here.” Because rap artists, unlike those big government fire departments, are accurate estimators of crowds, apparently.