A Different Type of Warrior

As my European friends would say, I’m “on holiday” this week. Translated in to American, that means I’m on vacation, so I was not planning to post my regular “Woman Warrior Wednesday” feature. Then, out of the blue, came these photographs of Zarghona, the young Afghan girl I found dying in a hospital in Kabul [...]

Monday Musings: Summer Vacation…Timing Is Everything

After some well placed and well timed hints from me, my husband agreed to take a week off so we could have a “summer getaway”. Nothing fancy, a rented place a block from the water off the Chesapeake Bay. The plan was to sleep, eat, and read. In exchange for his willingness to go away [...]

Monday Musings: This Wasn’t What We Planned

The following two stories are true, and have occurred in this past week. The names have been changed to protect everyone, some, quite frankly, who don’t deserve protection. Welcome to the latest of Perspectives’ new “regular features”: Woman Warrior Wednesday, Fashion & Finds Friday are now joined by “Monday Musings”, a weekly look at the [...]

Cosmo or Coma: al Qaeda Offers Women Both

Literature is rife with stories of people who made deals with the devil for youth, beauty, riches, or success in exchange for their soul. Usually the devil seeks them out in a moment of weakness, like he did Faust or Joe Boyd in the Broadway hit, “Damn Yankees”. Today, the always adaptable Lucifer entered the [...]

Courage vs. Polarization

We’ve seen two demonstrations of extraordinary courage by two ordinary women in the past month. In December, Ginger LIttleton, who had escaped, put herself back in to harm’s way to try to save her colleagues. With a purse as her only weapon, she attempted to knock the gun out of the hand of a man [...]

The “Downtown Browne” Show…

Technology has benefitted many industries, created many others, and turned the world in to a global marketplace. But no one group or segment of society has reaped more reward from the ability to sit in front of a keyboard to reach out and touch thousands of people, than the political establishment. The old expression “stump [...]

New Beginnings

It’s a testament to the human spirit that at the beginning of each New Year, we go through the same exercise, optimistically looking forward to what we believe will be better times ahead while setting countless resolutions that seldom are in effect when the daffodils bloom. But despite years that are not always better and [...]

To The Victor Go The Responsibilities…

The political world could look like a very different place tomorrow morning, if all the predictions come to pass. Or it could look like the same old power-mongering, I-want-mine, gridlocked morass that has brought us to this place. Whether this is heaven or this is hell is going to depend largely on how the Republicans [...]

The Campaign Trail Is No Place for Sissies or Non-believers

To run for political office you need to believe in "something"…yourself, your principles, perhaps even your party. In this current environment, you also need the skin of an alligator, the endurance of an athlete, and a will of iron. All those things were on display during the time I spent with Pat Toomey and his [...]

Power Is Palpable…

There are lots of benefits to being a writer; one of them is that in the pursuit of one story, you often encounter others. And so it was in Harrisburg at the meeting of the Republican State Committee. Mingling with the crowd at the reception before dinner, discreetly writing on the notebook stashed in my [...]

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