We’re coming up to the end of 2013, and one of our annual traditions at Hot Air is to take a look at the year’s most popular posts as we close it out.  We’ve compiled the top 50 most viewed posts for the year, and we’ll do a countdown in reverse order.  Assuming I’ve counted the days correctly, we’ll wrap up on New Years Eve with the top 10 posts of the year. (As anyone who has ever golfed with me knows, never assume I’ve counted correctly.)

The first set of ten posts span the entire year, from January to last week. We get ObamaCare, gun control, Sarah Palin, and a little side-eye from on high:

• #50: Classy: Pro-abortion protesters drown out “Amazing Grace” with chants of “Hail Satan” – What happens when the Texas legislature considers an abortion-limitation bill supported in principle by more than six out of ten Texans? The legislature gets hijacked by pro-abortion activists, of course.  This post noted what happened when the legislature went back into special session to deal with the bill, which passed easily, but not without this moment of unintentional honesty. Unfortunately, YouTube took down the original video, but you can see it here.
• #49: Industry source tells NRO: WH may have to consider “unthinkable options” if website meltdown continues into November – The first of what will be several ObamaCare-related posts, this one from just 18 days into the rolling disaster of the rollout.  “Unthinkable options” are starting to look a lot more … thinkable these days.
• #48: Duck Dynasty’s Phil Robertson suspended by A&E for comments on homosexuality – A late entry, from just nine days ago, but it’s already had over 66,000 page views. Who knew that talking about the relative merits of vaginas and anuses would get so much attention?  Uh … everyone, right? Including A&E?
• #47: Flashback: When Palin said Fannie/Freddie were too expensive to taxpayers in ’08, it was a “gaffe” – Alternate headline: Obama finally gets around to agreeing with Palin. If you listened closely, you could actually hear progressive heads exploding, if they bothered to acknowledge the cognitive dissonance. As MK noted, they largely didn’t.
• #46: Trey Gowdy to liberal law prof: If Obama can ignore parts of ObamaCare, could he ignore election laws too? – Another relatively recent entry, from three weeks ago, but a question that gets more and more attention every time Obama arbitrarily refuses to enforce a statute — in a law he demanded and got from a Democratic-controlled Congress with no Republican votes. The upshot here is that the judiciary will have to stop Obama, but that requires the courts to recognize the standing of people suing to stop him. Congress has that in most cases, so it’s going to either fall to Darrell Issa, or the courts will have to liberalize their conception of standing.
• #45: Two million bikers to meet ‘Million Muslim March’ in DC on 9/11 – Our most popular Green Room post of the year, courtesy of our Townhall colleague Katie Pavlich. The post was from August, but the event an anti-climax. Only 25 people showed up for the Million Muslim March by the start of the event, including its featured speaker Cornel West, but at least 75,000 bikers showed up in DC.
• #44: Bad news: Colorado Democrat defeated in recall election over gun control not taking it well – And by “not taking it well,” Allahpundit meant that Angela Giron claimed that she lost her Colorado recall election because of “voter suppression.” CNN’s Brooke Baldwin didn’t buy it, just as voters didn’t buy off on Giron’s gun-control activities, and especially on the efforts by Giron and John Morse to railroad the bill through the legislature.
• #43: Don’t be fooled. Gun confiscation has already begun in NY – The SAFE Act turned out not to be so safe for law-abiding gun owners who may at one time in their lives have had anti-anxiety medication prescribed by their physicians. I have had a Xanax prescription for air travel, although I haven’t used it in some time. In New York, that means that the police can seize my firearms. Or at least it did, until a state court put a stop to it. For now.
• #42: Video: Obama not handling gun-control failure in Senate very well –  “If actions by Congress could have saved one person, one child, a few hundred, a few thousand,” Obama fumed after his loss, then “we had an obligation to try.” We could make the same argument about abortion — and be a lot more correct, too. Obama pouted because he couldn’t get enhanced background checks to pass a Senate controlled by his own party, but that’s due in large part because Obama and his allies first tried sweeping bans on so-called “assault weapons” first, poisoning the well by accusing gun owners of complicity in mass murders for opposing the ineffectual and arbitrary bans.  If he had limited himself from the start to enhanced background checks, Obama might have succeeded. Instead, he likely spiked the issue for a decade.
• #41: Revealed: Why Michelle Obama rolled her eyes at Boehner – Some lip-reading fun from the beginning of the year. The First Lady rolled her eyes at the Inauguration Day luncheon, which got bloggers across the spectrum curious as to what prompted it. The truth — or at least as close as we’ll ever get to it before one of the three principals write their memoirs — is a little disappointing, but amusing enough to draw over 69,000 page views.

Tomorrow, we’ll have more about ObamaCare, get our first recollection of the Boston Marathon bombing, and an epiphany on George Zimmerman. Stay tuned!