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 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.

Not last week. Thanks to the Palin nomination, we received more than 1,700 usable letters between Aug. 31 and Sept. 6.

(Possibly a whole lot more -- pressed for time, we were forced to stop keeping count of the Palin correspondence early Sept. 5.)

1,472 letters were in our Top Five topics:

Sarah Palin: 1,214 letters, including reponses to news stories, editorials, and op-eds;

McCain and the convention, including the political response to Hurricane Gustav: 147 letters;

Barack Obama: 60 letters;

Detriot automakers: 21 letters, responding to a Times editorial urging the government not to bail out car companies;

And, in a tie for fifth, Dan Ariely on consumer confidence: 15 letters, responding to op-ed; and Tim Rutten on Catholics and abortion: 15 letters, responding to a column.