He's the columnist you love to hate!  Last week, in what may be a first, two columns by Jonah Goldberg took two spots in the Letters Top Five -- er, make that the Letters Top Three. 

(How is this possible?  While Goldberg writes just once each week, in this case the letters responding to his columns were published in the same week, and therefore show up in the same Top Five tally.)

During the week ending March 14, The Times received 578 usable letters, 231 of which were in our Top Five Topics.

• Goldberg on Limbaugh: 66 letters, reacting to this column about Rush Limbaugh;
• Gay marriage: 55 letters, responding to coverage of the hearings to determine the constitutionality of Proposition 8, the gay marriage ban;
• Goldberg on fearmongering: 43 letters, reacting to this column on the Obama administration's hope to "never let a crisis go to waste";
• Stem cell research: 37 letters, commenting on President Obama's decision to restore federal funding for human embryonic stem cell research and his pledge to elevate the role of science in setting public policy; and
• Teacher troubles: 30 letters, responding to teacher layoffs in California and the president's support of merit pay for educators.

How the Top Five is tabulated: Each week, your letters maven 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 she cuts out spam, obscene mail, letters addressed to more than one recipient, letters that seem to be the fruit of letter-writing campaigns and letters with attachments (which gum up our computer systems), she is usually left with several hundred eligible items, represented in the Letters Top Five tally. From these, she selects the somewhere around 100 that get published in the newspaper. Faxes and snail mail are not reflected in the chart.