Hot Air’s top 50 posts in 2010: 31-40

After consulting the web gurus and technical wizards behind Hot Air’s big green curtain, we have our next set of the most-viewed posts for 2010. This set is heavy on Tea Parties, ObamaCare, and Rick Sanchez.  It has the guaranteed traffic magnet of TSA, but interestingly, no Sarah Palin or Chris Christie posts. It does, however, have one Glenn Beck reference, so the world is still somehow right.

Note: By popular demand, we’ll order these in countdown style from now on.

• #40: Finally: George Will vs Meghan McCain on the tea-party movement – Thank goodness ABC hired Christiane Amanpour to inject journalistic credibility into This Week.  If this was a fight, it would have been called before the first round.  In debates, though, they don’t have formal intellectual weight classes.
• #39: MS-NBC anchor: I’m so bummed that Shahzad wasn’t a Tea Partier – Contessa Brewer starts off by talking about bigotry and inadvertently reveals her own.  Must-see TV.
• #38: Breaking: Rick Sanchez fired from CNN – It didn’t take long for CNN to react to Sanchez’ accusation that the Joooooos control the media, including, er, his own channel.  As Allahpundit noted, we finally found out what it took to get fired from CNN.
• #37: Open thread: the Restoring Honor rally – When I began looking at these, I wondered whether I should include open threads, but decided that since we’re using traffic numbers, they qualify.  Only a couple made it into the top 50 posts this year, and no, none of them were NFL threads.
• #36: Sanchez: CNN run by the Jews – Mediaite covered Sanchez’ flameout in detail, and this was our first post on the subject.  Sanchez really beclowned himself well in his interview with Pete Dominick by starting off with an accusation of bigotry against Jon Stewart and finishing with a Jews-secretly-control-the-media canard.
• #35: Press corps grills Gibbs: Um, didn’t Obama shamelessly lie about C-SPAN? – Well, yes he did.  The question got prompted by all of the backroom wheeling and dealing on ObamaCare, including entire rewrites of the legislation in secret, along with White House involvement in negotiations behind closed doors.  The embarrassment led to a televised debate, “moderated” by Obama, between Congressional Republicans and Democrats a few weeks later in which Obama ended up looking petty and defensive most of the day.  Campaign promises have a way of coming back to bite Presidents, and this one took a chunk out of Obama’s armor.
• #34: “Not true”: Alito mouths words as Obama hammers Supreme Court – Justice Samuel Alito didn’t make a noise, but he did make a stink with his quiet response to Obama’s attack on the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision during the State of the Union address.  The moment became a momentary Rorschach test on politics: liberals accused Alito of a breach of decorum, while conservatives ripped Obama for his gracelessness in attacking the court directly during the speech.  The result?   Don’t expect to see many members of the Court at next month’s SOTU.
• #33: Deval Patrick on Beck rally: “It’s a free country.  I wish it weren’t.” – It’s not often that a major political figure publicly expresses a distaste for freedom, but to be fair, Patrick is governor of Massachusetts.  Considering the people they routinely send to Washington, it doesn’t come as much of a surprise.
• #32: Video: TSA body-searches a three-year-old girl – The video itself was almost two years old when it came to our attention, but it certainly caught the mood of the moment — and was hardly the only example of its kind.  The reason it originally came to light was because the child’s father turned out to be a television reporter who filmed the entire disturbing incident on his cell phone.
• #31: Another ObamaCare mandate we had to discover after its passage – Nancy Pelosi infamously told us that we had to pass ObamaCare to discover what was in it, and she was right.  Just days after passage by Congress, the AP discovered a federal menu mandate that applied to any restaurant chain of 20 or more locations, regardless of whether those locations crossed state lines.  Three days later, my exclusive report on the mandate’s impact featured a local Minnesota chain, Davanni’s, and how the impact would force them to reduce customer choice and raise prices — which has a bigger impact on smaller restaurant chains, thanks to the economies of scale on menu changes.

Update: Readers can find #41-50 in yesterday’s post.

• Quotes of the day
• IRS Commissioner: Yeah, we staged that Lerner apology
• Obama administration sources explain Benghazi: “It’s actually closer to us being idiots”

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