ABC News reports on Tea Party organizers falsely citing ABC News as source for 1 - 1.5 million crowd size estimates.

The initial reports suggest that today's Tea Bagging march on Washington is a pretty small affair. The Post refers to "tens of thousands" of protestors and says about 30,000 registered online for the march.

In a pretty transparent attempt to set expectations ridiculously high, a House leadership aide had sent out a memo to colleagues estimating up to two million people. Still 30,000 people seems a pretty small.

Let me know if you find articles with estimates today of how many people showed up and/or predictions from the organizers about how many they expected.

Also see our slideshow of the ramp up activities for this weekend's rally.

Late Crowd Size Update: And it begins. The DC Fire Department has issued an unofficial estimate of 60,000 to 70,000 people in attendance, which is smallish by big DC protest/event standards but definitely respectable. Meanwhile, organizers and various participants are claiming one or two million have shown up but that the numbers are being suppressed by pro-Obama media, etc.

TPM Reader SO reports in on today's Tea Party protests, where they appear to be keeping it real classy.

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Tea Partiers march on Washington, chanting "You lie!" That and other political news in today's TPMDC Saturday Roundup.

A reader reports in from the Conradian heart of crazy ...

Joe Wilson's not the only one bringing the crazy to DC. The town's been invaded by teabaggers.

Was having a drink with a friend at a fancy downtown bar when two well-dressed men start chatting with us. Seemed friendly and normal enough until one asks how big we think the march tomorrow will be -- "250,000? They say all the hotels are full!" I ask, "Are you here for that?" -- and get an earful about how Medicare has a $35 trillion unfunded liability, every letter you mail costs $1 is taxes, and Obama is a Manchurian candidate who wants to create a million-person national civil defense force with a budget equal to the Penatagon's.

Tomorrow should be fun.

We were looking at this story earlier today but held off addressing it because it wasn't clear whether it was tied to the victim's political beliefs. But it seems it was.

Harlan James Drake, 33, is suspected of shooting Jim Pouillon, a 63 year old anti-abortion activist and Michael Fuoss, 63. Witnesses at the Pouillon shooting gave police a license plate number and description that quickly led them to Drake who then admitted he'd also murdered Fuoss about an hour earlier.

Drake apparently planned a third murder against an unidentified victim but was arrested before he had a chance to carry it out.

What makes this brutal story so odd and almost surreal is that Drake apparently had a unique set of grievances against each victim. Some personal, some political. According to police, Drake was "offended by the manner of Mr Pouillon's message." Pouillon was well-known in the community for frequently protesting outside local schools and churches with graphic photos of aborted fetuses. Meanwhile, Drake's father had once worked at Fuoss's Gravel company. So presumably his beef with Fuoss was familial, personal.

I'm awarding the little known TPM Excellence in Deft Snark Award to Megan Carpentier of the Air America website for this sentence from a post on AARP's poll on the president's health care speech. The award is granted episodically for path-breaking combinations of AP Style and deadpan humor ...

An overnight poll by AARP shows that Obama's speech on health care helped resolve the concerns of many people over 45 dumb enough to believe braying Republicans that the Administration planned on executing the elderly.

Had I been editing I think I'd have stuck a "who say" between 'Republicans' and 'that'. But that's a minor quibble.

I've seen this happen before. Rightwing group comes up with bogus 'awards' and 'honors' to sucker in egomaniac political contributors. But they get so hard up and desperate that they go and award one to someone in the porn business or something like that

Today it was Newt Gingrich's turn.

Newt, or actually his 527 group American Solutions, named Allison Vivas of porn studio 'Pink Visual' as its "Entrepreneur of the Year."

And she was more than game.

Late Update: If you really can't get enough, here's the actual letter granting the prestigious award.

Slideshow: Remembering 9/11.

Democrats had signaled that a censure vote for Rep. Wilson (R-SC) was not in the cards. But new reports have the Dems and particularly Speaker Pelosi telling Wilson that he must either apologize to the House or face a censure motion. On a strictly political calculus, it's a little hard to figure. When someone is doing so much to damage themselves and their party, generally you try not to get in their way. The key, however, seems to be Wilson's increasingly unrepentant attitude over the last two days and his refusal to go down to the well of the House and apologize to the body for his actions.

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Unless Rep. Joe Wilson (R-SC) takes to the House floor to apologize for his "You lie!" outburst -- which Democrats and reportedly some Republicans have been pressing him to do -- Nancy Pelosi is prepared to greenlight a censure resolution as soon as next week.

Here's a funny, somewhat humiliating, political story. It turns out that Sen. Richard Burr (R-NC) may be in a bit of trouble for reelection next year. His approval rating is an awful 38% and though he appears to be beating all the potential fairly unknown opponents, he's clocking in in the low forties against all of them. With those numbers you'd figure that he'd either been a terrible senator, taken a few hikes on the Appalachian Trail or gotten seriously out of sync with his constituents on some big issue. But as Eric Kleefeld explains, it's not really that Burr's unpopular. It's just that in almost six years as a senator he's barely made any impression at all on the state's electorate. It's not that he's too right or left or mired in scandal or even incompetent. He's just so boring and lame that folks don't have any particular opinion of him one way or another.

Rep. Joe "You lie!" Wilson now trailing in his reelection bid against Rob Miller, 44-43, according to a new poll.

"In a matter of seconds Joe Wilson turned himself from a safe incumbent into one of the most vulnerable Republicans in the country for 2010," the pollster observes.

The Holder Justice Department declines to reverse decision by its predecessor not to indict former Justice Department official Bradley Scholzman for perjury in his testimony to Congress.

Here's the letter from DOJ to Sen. Chuck Schumer announcing the decision.

Not only was fmr. state Rep. Michael Duvall (R-Yorba Linda) booted from his committee and eventually forced to resign over his raunchy bragging about his sexual exploits at Tuesday's committee hearing in Sacramento. Now the guy who was sitting next to him -- state Rep. Jeff Miller (R-Anaheim) -- has been kicked off one of his committees too. Zack Roth has the story.

Apparently Sens. Baucus and Conrad have decided to toughen up the illegal alien provisions in the senate bill to address Rep. Wilson's concerns.

So it seems like we have a much better idea now of what happened with this false report of the Coast Guard firing on a suspicious vessel in the Potomac.

[ed.note: TPM Reader Mark Blacknell was nearby and took this photo of the exercise this morning. We cannot confirm that either of these is the exact boat that made the faux report of gunfire. Click photo to see full sized image]

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CNN is now confirming that the whole thing (reported incident of the Coast Guard firing on a suspicious vessel in the Potomac) was in fact a training exercise. Not clear what the misunderstanding it was or whether this was a question of one arm of the government not knowing what another arm was doing. Happily, no one, apparently, was ever in any peril. Though presumably there are a few folks whose jobs may now be in real peril.

We're not sure what's happening here. But a Coast Guard vessel has apparently just opened fire (though perhaps just as warning shots) on a vessel in a restricted zone on the Potomac River.

Late Update: Conflicting and more very odd details. The Coast Guard is now reportedly denying that shots were fired and there is some questions -- unconfirmed reports -- that the whole thing may have been a training exercise of some sort. We'll keep you posted on the latest we hear.