Opinion: The Letters Top Five

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Each week, Letters to the Editor receives thousands of e-mails, dozens of letters through the good old U.S. postal service, and even a few faxes here and there.

After we cut out spam, obscene mail, letters addressed to more than one recipient, letters that seem to be the fruit of letter-writing campaigns (last week’s biggie: complaints about Jerome Corsi’s ‘Obama Nation’) and letters with attachments (which gum up our computer systems), we usually are left with several hundred eligible items, from which we select the somewhere around 100 that get published in the newspaper every week.

In the week starting Aug. 17, we received almost 600 usable letters, 346 of which were in our Top Five Topics:

The presidential election: 181 letters, reacting to 15 stories covering everything from the forum at Saddleback Church to Cindy McCain’s hand injury;

Russia: 86 letters, responding to three stories about the conflict in Georgia;

State budget: 33 letters, responding to six stories about budget paralysis in Sacramento;

Energy: 31 letters, responding to four stories about skyrocketing gas prices and the people who pray for them to fall;

Electoral college: 31 letters, responding to a Times editorial calling on California to dump the electoral college. Most respondents thought it was a lousy idea.