Unemployment is skyrocketing.  GDP is falling.  Iran is building nuclear weapons, and North Korea is launching missiles.  No one knows what happened to almost a trillion dollars of TARP money.  So what are your elected representatives doing about all of that?  Nothing, because they’re too busy hyperventilating over college football:

The coordinator of the Bowl Championship Series told Congress Friday that a switch to a playoff would threaten the existence of celebrated bowl games, but skeptical lawmakers called college football’s system of choosing its top team unfair.

Rep. Joe Barton of Texas, who has introduced legislation that would prevent the NCAA from labeling a game a national championship unless it’s the outcome of a playoff system, said that efforts to tinker with the BCS were bound to fail.

“It’s like communism,” he said at the House Energy and Commerce Committee’s commerce, trade and consumer protection subcommittee hearing. “You can’t fix it.”

The stupidity wasn’t limited to one side of the aisle:

Under the BCS, some conferences get automatic bids to participate while others do not. Conferences that get an automatic bid — the ACC, Big East, Big 12, Big Ten, Pac-10 and SEC — get about $18 million each, far more than the non-conference schools. Swofford is also commissioner of the ACC.

“How is this fair?” asked the subcommittee chairman, Democratic Rep. Bobby Rush of Illinois, who has co-sponsored Barton’s bill. “How can we justify this system … are the big guys getting together and shutting out the little guys?”

Memo to all sides in Congress: Get back to work.  The BCS isn’t a federal issue, and in fact it’s not a government issue.  The NCAA is a private organization, and if the Mountain West conference doesn’t like the arrangement, its schools can opt out.  Let the schools work out the “fairness” issue between themselves.

And to Joe Barton, get a grip.  The NCAA is not like “communism” at all.  It’s a private enterprise with voluntary membership.  It’s not a government agency.

I don’t like the BCS, but I hate government interference in private enterprise.  That’s like communism, and maybe Barton should start spending his time and our money fighting that instead of worrying about college football championships.