By DR. LARRY MOSES

No one asked me but… Moammar Gadhafi is a thug. He is a terrorist and has been for years. He is and has been a despicable human being. This did not happen overnight.

All that being said, he is also the leader of Libya and as such, he watched what happened in Egypt and Tunisia. He decided that he is not willing to turn his country over to a group of rebels even if we in the United States want him to. Rather than follow the examples of Egyptian and Tunisian leaders, he has decided to fight it out. This means the unorganized, untrained, and poorly lead rebels will be facing a trained, equipped, and paid military. As in Egypt and Tunisia, the rebel forces have no leadership and have failed to offer an alternative to the established government.

I wish the rebels well but I fail to see how we as a nation have a dog in this fight. It is not as though any of these predominately Muslim nations are supporters of America.

It makes me wonder what American leadership expects from a leader of a nation. I remember tanks in Detroit in 1967 when riots were taking place. President Johnson ordered 13,000 National Guard troops into the city. Running gun battles took place between citizens and National Guardsmen. Forty-three people were killed, 467 were injured and 7,000 arrested. There was over eighty million dollars in damage to the city.

I really don’t believe it is in the interest of the United States to get involved in a third war in the Middle East. If the United Nations believes there is an issue to be resolved in this battle that should extend outside the borders of Libya, more power to them. Let Russia, China, England, France and other members of the United Nations step up to the table and resolve the issue in Libya.

No one asked me but… There are those who actually believe that the unrest in the Middle East has caused the rise in fuel prices in the United States. These people also believe in the tooth fairy, big-foot and unicorns.

The rise in gas prices is exactly what the Obama administration has been advocating since taking office. The liberals in government have advocated a gas price of over five dollars hoping to drive America to alternative fuels.

It is time for Americans to realize that fossil fuels drive the world. We also need to realize there is an abundance of fossil fuels right here in America. It is time to drill American oil using American companies supplying American jobs and keeping American money in America.

When oil prices exceeded forty dollars a barrel, it became economically sound to convert coal to gas. This nation has a three hundred year supply of coal deposits. There is also enough oil within the territorial limits of the United States so that we would never need to purchase a single barrel of foreign oil. However, this would not help the global economy and would upset our liberal legislators who want to push us to green power. Since we tied the American economy to the world economy, America’s economic status has declined.

Don’t get me wrong I have no problem replacing fossil fuels as soon as we come up with an economical way to do it. I believe that if the United States were to decide on this course of action we could, in the next ten to twenty years, replace fossil fuels. Putting our scientists to work on this problem, we could develop an alternative fuel that would be economically feasible for the American people.

The tragedy is that those who champion alternative fuels are not interested in developing the technology to lower the cost of green energy. They are attacking the problem by increasing the cost of fossil fuels by opposing drilling and placing taxes on the fuel driving up the cost. Over fifty cents of every gallon of gas you purchase is in direct taxes. The cap and trade tax, championed by eco-nuts, further drives up the cost of energy produced by fossil fuels.

No one asked me but… I will be driving a little over six thousand miles this year to Iowa and Texas. If I were to get excited about using a vehicle that is all electric, I would have to pony up between thirty and forty thousand dollars for the vehicle. I would have to stop on the average of a little over every one hundred miles and wait for eight hours for my all-electric car to recharge. This is assuming that I don’t use the A/C, radio or lights. It also assumes that the weather doesn’t drop below forty degrees and there are no hills to climb. Each of the above mentioned possibilities will shorten the range of my all-electric car.

If the Motel will let me hook up to an outlet for eight hours, I will be recharged and ready for another two hour journey. I could travel only one hundred miles a day so I would have to plan where a stop would be every two hours or so. You want to try that in rural Nevada? It would be fifteen days back to Iowa and another fifteen days home. My trip to Texas would be the same.

We have, in the last twenty years perfected the internal combustion engine to where most cars can now be operated with very little maintenance. Remember when tune-ups and brake jobs were almost a yearly event?

Are the bugs all worked out of these new all electric engines and, if not, where do you get repairs within that one hundred mile radius. If you run out of electricity, can you send someone to town for a can of electricity?

After one hundred thousand miles, it would be time to replace the batteries at the tune of approximately five thousand dollars. What do we do with the expended batteries? You think replacing your mercury vapor houselights is a problem? You aren’t bagging these things up.

Of course, there is always Yucca Mountain. There is probably no need to worry about the water table contamination. Beside who cares that the water shed from Yucca Mountain runs off to our California eco-nut neighbors.

Thought of the week…Sometimes I wonder whether the world is being run by smart people who are putting us on, or by imbeciles who really mean it.”

— Mark Twain