Well, I can’t say I’m surprised. All my liberal friends are talking about President Obama’s first week in office and his very good approval rating – 68%, so I hear.

Surprisingly, or not, one of my biggest concerns is the issue of health funding, which will now be reinstated, to overseas organizations which also provide abortions.

I won’t argue that these institutions provide much-needed services, especially to women. The purpose, however, of cutting funding in the first place was not to deny these services, but to combat abortion.

I won’t even say that I know too much about all the ins and outs, but I do know that abortion is wrong. Biblically and morally, why would anyone want to kill a child? An infant, if you will, or let’s even use the word “fetus”. Sure, abortion proponents call the child a fetus because that makes them feel better. And a lot of them are all about “feelings” – if it “feels” good, do it; they “feel” that Obama will be a great president; they don’t “feel” anything is wrong with this.

Responsibility lies with the woman – that’s not sexist or discriminatory, it’s simply a fact that a woman carries a child; we’ll stay away from the issue of Thomas Whatshisname for now. During the 1980s, the most recent statistics I can find at the moment, there were approximately 67 million pregnancies in the US. Not quite 22% of these babies were aborted – that’s 1.5 million children who were never born. What if one of those children was you? Or your mother? Or one of your siblings? How do you “feel” about that?

Don’t you think perhaps the mother should have been more careful about using protection? Sure, it doesn’t work all the time, but 99.9% of the time, birth control is completely effective. It simply prevents the egg from being fertilized, resulting in no fetus, no baby, no collection of viable cells.

Women don’t get pregnant by accident – there has to be sexual intercourse involved. No sex, no pregnancy. The choice is not to abort or to carry a child to term – THE CHOICE IS TO ABSTAIN FROM SEX if you don’t want a child.

The most common question I’ve heard from those who think abortion is a great thing, is what about a woman who has been raped? Should she be “forced” to carry a rapist’s child to term? Strictly speaking, that child is half hers, the DNA it carries is from the mother too. Life is life, regardless of how it began.

More statistics: it’s been said that approximately 32,000 pregnancies occur each year due to rape; if 22% of these pregnancies were aborted, that’s 7000 children who will never be born. A far cry from the 1.5 million who were aborted on a whim. Yes, I said “whim”. Abortion is not undertaken lightly, but in reality – there is no reason; only excuses.

I have the utmost sympathy for a victim of rape; I also have sympathy for a resulting child, who had no choice either. There is no easy answer, but a woman should not be able to make a unilateral decision to kill her child; as an adult, we all have to do unpleasant or downright horrible things, simply as a part of the accountability and responsibility we that we claim as adults.

Of course, many abortion proponents try to turn the tables on those of us who are opposed, and they play the “death penalty card”. They ask how we can strive to protect innocent babies, but have no problem flipping the switch on a convicted murderer. They conveniently gloss over the words “innocent” versus “convicted”.

It’s going to be a long four years; our new President is not really surprising anyone thus far. Let’s hope things don’t get as bad as we expect.

Can I talk about MS here on the Internet and say not very complimentary things –without being kicked offline completely and forever?

Well, I’ll take that chance.

So MS comes out with a cool new console, and the game “Halo”. My son got hooked on it, and played a lot – and he’s very good. Then we get snookered into buying “Halo 2”. Okay, fine, we can handle that.

Then “Halo 3”. The big deal. The top gaming experience. The only catch: you have to have a new Xbox console, the 360. After listening to the kids, and mulling it over for quite some time, we finally caved and bought the Xbox 360 as a joint birthday present for the two of them. Fortunately we were able to Ebay the older one, so ended up spending closer to $200 – not counting games, of course.

Fast forward to just over a year later; yes, the warranty is just a year, unless you experience the “red ring of death” – that’s good for a fix for three years. A free one, too.

Let’s just say that, so far, we’ve spent well over $1000 on Xboxes, games, accessories, etc. Now let’s try to navigate MS’s “help” website. Have you ever noticed that anything at all, on a PC, that says “help”, is actually NOT helpful at all? Well, it’s just like that on the support site.

First, you have to login with your email address; they’ll tell you it isn’t valid. Then you try your Office Live account email, which you didn’t use when you signed up for Xbox Live anyway – heck, you didn’t even have an Office account then.

So you manage to sign in with Office; the next step is to create your gamer tag, etc., but – and this is important – you already HAVE a gamer tag. You can enter your gamer tag till the cows come home, and MS will keep telling you it’s “already taken”. Somewhere there’s a glitch. Sound familiar?

When you try to bypass all this and enter an online repair request, it gets even more exciting. You have to enter the serial number a minimum of five times before it’s accepted; they ask questions as to which lights are blinking, which error messages you received, etc. Finally they’ll tell you that your console is no longer under warranty, even though it’s just a few weeks past the anniversary of your purchase date.

They tell you that you can box the thing up and send it back for repairs, but it will cost you a couple hundred dollars. Is this really fair? After we bought the thing in order to play a game that MS designed to ONLY be playable on one particular console? After all the money we’ve sent their way, we’re getting screwed. And I know it’s not just us – it’s probably you, too. And you, and you, and you.

I hear they’re laying off a few thousand workers – is this the beginning of the end for MS? Has the revolution started? Count me in! I want my money back. And I’m living with a very, very disappointed 11-year-old.