They're already semi-professional anyway.

At the same time, institute these rules, with 100% compliance required, or that program gets the NCAA "death penalty" forever:

All players live among the regular students, no special athletes' facilities.

All players attend classes and take exams with their classmates. Game schedules will be adjusted to compensate.

If a team's graduation rate differs (in the negative) vs. the graduation rate of the school as a whole, the number of scholarships available in that sport is reduced by an equal percentage for the following year.

No player can be drafted or signed by any professional league in any sport until the graduation year of their nominal graduating class. No signing with agents before that year.

Violations of eligibility or recruiting rules will penalize coaches and athletic directors, not student athletes. (Two or three well-publicized years without employment for a few violators and the rest ought to fall in line pretty fast.)

What are the chances there are some Republican versions of Holy Joe? Peeling off a few cooperative R's wouldn't hurt, now would it? I mean, there have to be a few, even after all this time of the nutcase right being out front.

Who knows, in the House there may even be a party-switcher or two to be coaxed along.

McCain wants so desperately to be president that he has become the scary (batshit crazy?) contemporary version of Hubert Humphrey in 1968. Humphrey, for those readers challenged by their youth and inexperience, wanted so badly to be president that he was willing to mortgage his beliefs and take the Johnsonian line on Vietnam until it was too late in the game.

McCain wants it so badly he is trying - far too transparently, it must be said, with a sigh of relief - to be all things to all Republicans. That will remove the chance he may once have had to appeal to anyone else remains to be seen. And even his "all things to all Republicans" act may not play.

Actually, I look at the Republican field for 2008 and breathe easy - for now. McCain (flat out nuts), Giuliani (an "oppo research" man's dream candidate), Brownback (makes McCain look comparatively sane), Romney (can you say delusional flip-flopper?), Gingrich (standup comics all over America are praying you'll run, Newt!); who among this lot will possibly be able to appeal to a broad enough spectrum of voters? Especially if the Dems find their brains and nominate someone other than the near-guaranteed divisive disaster that will be Sen. Clinton, if she makes it that far.

Even if we discard Brownback as too far gone even for the presidency of Mars, Gingrich as the running joke he stands to be, and Romney as the flip-flopping misfit he demonstrably is, we have McCain and Giuliani. McCain, as I'd said above, is crazy, and I'm willing to bet that even the best efforts of the punditocracy won't be enough to overcome the inevitable meltdown once he's asked an inopportune question or two in a public forum. And Giuliani has the demeanor of a sour old crab, let alone a checkered - to be charitable - past that even a mediocre opposition researcher could tie around his neck like an anchor, even though his past marriage to a second cousin might garner him a few additional votes in some precincts in the South...

The House Republicans ought to have the right to speak, to put things forward, and to have them properly considered.

They need not have the right to a guarantee that what they put forward will be acted on, let alone passed.

They need not have the right to obstruct.

They need not have the right to disrupt.

They definitely do not warrant the right to slip anything resembling an "earmark" into any bill. (For that matter, neither do Democrats - earmarks need to go, and the sooner the better.)

Civility and propriety have their places, to be sure, but a little crow needs to be publicly consumed by the party of the elephant first.

Donald Trump and Rosie O'Donnell deserve each other. Sadly, their "mutual derogation society" act is being played out in public, where we all get to endure at least part of it.

I said it in another letter earlier, I'll say it again: Why on earth does anyone care what either of these two repellent buffoons thinks about anything?

Why does anyone give that shrieking lunatic any page space at all? She says nothing, although she tends to say it at obnoxious length.

Is she still under 42? Maybe if she had the courage to enlist and put her own skanky, shriveled self on the line for what she claims to believe I could take her seriously.

Dennis Prager needs to be removed from the board straightaway. His very presence there undermines any credibility they might otherwise have.

In all seriousness, why would any sane person care what either of these two thinks about literally anything?

"Fact was, the President was named after his paternal grandfather, a fine and prominent American who served as President of the United States Golf Association..."

Care to work in a mention of Prescott Bush, that famous Hitler-loving member of the family?

Or how John Ellis Bush, the other brother, calls himself "Jeb" to make himself appear a little less of a prepster?

Face it, Yellow Elephant, you admire a crime family. If they were all permanently exiled offshore, from "Poppy" and "Babs" to the smallest of the great-(gack!)-grandchildren, it would do the United States, and indeed the entire rest of the world, with the singular exception of whatever isolated island was chosen, one enormous favor.