Opinion: The Letters Top Five

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Last week, a relatively slow one for Letters, Proposition 8 once again took first position in the Letters Top Five -- thanks to this Op-Ed by Katha Pollitt and a package about two couples, one gay and one straight, dealing with the initiative’s aftermath.

During the week ending Jan 3, The Times received 498 usable letters, 259 of which were in our Top Five Topics.

• Proposition 8: 99 letters;
• Unrest in Gaza: 71 letters;
• Twilight for the Bush administration, including responses to this editorial pondering potential prosecution for members of the Bush Administration: 45 letters;
• California’s budget, including this editorial urging an end to the supermajority requirement, which calls for 2/3 of the state legislature to approve budgets and tax hikes: 24 letters; and
• Bernard Madoff’s scam: 20 letters.

Note to readers: to conserve cash, the Letters Top Five is being furloughed for two weeks. It will return later this month.

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.