Jami Floyd

The 2011 Tribeca Film Festival is in full swing, here in New York, celebrating it’s tenth year with a bevy of science fiction, drama and even horror films to capture the imagination. But the genre in which I am most interested, this time around, is a love story - disguised as a documentary.

The Winklevoss twins keep suing over Facebook, but sometimes long-term lawsuits pay off. Jami Floyd, legal analyst, sometime guest host for the Brian Lehrer Show, and IAFC blogger, fields calls about what goes into decisions about when to sue, when to appeal, and when to give up the case.

This is an about-face. The administration had said it would try these detainees in civilian court. That was the right thing to do, as a matter of law. But then something else got in t...

President Obama has been very busy lately, what with Japan, the budget, not to mention launching an attack on Libya. Still, the president himself has been under fire. The leader of the free world, it seems, isn't free to take a break from the real-world madness to partake in a little March Madness.

Rush Limbaugh: “The Dow Jones Industrial Average is down nearly 300 right now. My guess is that the Street really doesn't like Obama's NCAA bracket."

Sean Hannity: "The NCAA tournament picks, I'm sure they're really important for ESPN, but maybe not at this particular time."

Newt Gingrich: America needs "a commander-in-chief not a spectator-in-chief." The list goes on; but you get the idea.

It's A Free Country blogger Jami Floyd and listeners talk about the impact of Geraldine Ferraro, former member of Congress from Queens and the first woman on a major party presidential ticket.

Read Jami Floyd's post "On Geraldine's Shoulders" and Share your story here.

 

Today when she saw the headline on the front page of the Los Angeles Times, “Geraldine Ferraro: A ‘Lightening Bolt’ for Women in Politics,” my twelve-year-old daughter asked me, “Mama, who’s Geraldine Ferraro?

Sigh. What to say?

Well, of course, Geraldine Ferraro was the first female nominee for Vice President of the United States. And I started there.

I remember Elizabeth Taylor most of all, not for the breathiness of her famous voice, but for fact that she lent that voice to a community desperately in need of one in its moment of ...

We watched as Henrickson the Man morphed into Henrickson the Politician - an egoist who forgets his original purpose in running for office: To secure the rights of his underrepresente...

Snyder v. Phelps pitted the free speech rights of a group of arguably mean-spirited but dedicated religious zealots against the asserted privacy rights of a sympathetic military famil...

Let's all stop and take a deep breath to reconsider the news of this week.

The Obama administration announced it would no longer defend the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA).

Same-sex marriage has become one of the most contentious issues of our time. There is one thing, however, proponents and opponents would likely agree upon: these battles being waged...

For over a month, we’ve been talking about revolution in the Middle East. It started with a man who set himself on fire, desperate, after police confiscated the produce he sold without a permit.

Mohamed Bouazizi, a 26-year-old university graduate without a steady job, was trying to support his family. His self-immolation has left him burned from head to toe, in intensive care, wrapped completely in white gauze bandages. But he spurred his country to action, leading to transformation in Tunisia and demonstrations that spread across North Africa to Egypt. And now the world turns its attention to what will happen next in Yemen, Libya and Bahrain.

On the front page of Tuesday's New York Times: Democracy protests in Iran, Yemen and Bahrain. But I want to talk about Iraq. As I mentioned on this page last week, the U.S. miscalculated badly there, spending hundreds of billions of dollars trying to bring democracy to the Middle East. But, in an ironic twist, as the winds of change sweep through the region, true democracy has not come to Iraq.

History teaches that real change is organic and comes from within; it cannot be imposed from without.

I have been watching the events in Egypt over these 18 days and it was clear that the country had risen together for a single cause — the removal of President Hosni Mubarak. But as I have suggested before, a revolution does not a democracy make.

There can be no orderly transition of government in Egypt in the midst of chaos. The protestors have made their point. They have won the day: Murbarak has resigned.

Halle Berry may not choose her words as carefully as a politician, but this is the realpolitik she is talking about. She may not be as eloquent as a preacher, but this is the painfu...

Having a constitution and respecting that constitution are clearly not synonymous. Without legitimacy, a constitution is nothing more than words on a page. The importance of a c...

In the week since the State of the Union, it seems we analyst-types have dissected every word; but perhaps as many people have taken the President to task for words not spoken: poverty, race, gun control.

For me, there were two more words noticeably absent: Guantanamo Bay.

Too often, the stories black and brown (and women) filmmakers want to tell cannot get a green light. Studios do not want to take the chance on a story that is out of what they perceiv...

Last night I watched with 100 of my fellow political junkies as President Obama gave his third State of the Union address. We tweeted along, in earnest, with mostly substantive commentary, though the tweets were laced with wry humor about John Boehner's emotional reaction to Obama's remark about his boyhood and whether Vice President Biden himself was tweeting.

I said on this page yesterday that, for Obama, this speech needed to be a big transformational moment, a speech that would evoke FDR and Kennedy, one that would remind us why we voted for him in the first place.