Jami Floyd

There is great alarm in America about a great many things in Egypt, including the treatment of journalists during recent anti-government protests. The ugly truth, however, predates t...

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.

It's A Free Country bloggers Jami Floyd, Karol Markowicz, Justin Krebs, and Solomon Kleinsmith join our listeners in reacting to last night's State of the Union address.

→ Read More and Join the Conversation at It's A Free Country

No doubt, even a great speaker, like President Barack Obama, will be tinkering with his State of the Union speech up to the last minute. So, here is my humble advice in two words: Think Big.

Simply put, this appearance creates appearance problems. It adds to the politicization of the judiciary. And so, I am forced to consider — with all due respect — whether Justice Scali...

I remember my background check. I thought it was intrusive, a violation of my privacy and unnecessary. Now, 17 years later, the U.S. Supreme Court has passed on the very question...

Experience suggests there is little chance the attack will produce significant new legislation, let alone change a national culture that has been accepting of guns since its incepti...

A national holiday is nice; but it is not enough. To honor and respect the memory of Dr. King, those massacred in Arizona and all Americans who have lost their lives to senseless viol...

Federal judge John M. Roll was among the victims killed in the Tucson shootings last week. His untimely death—and the unnerving frequency with which judges require protection from vio...

9 year-old shooting victim Christina Taylor Green was born on September 11, 2001, and killed last Saturday.

As President Obama said, “here was a young girl just becoming aware of our democracy...." 

"She saw all this through the eyes of a child, undimmed by the cynicism or vitriol that we adults all too often just take for granted," the president said.

He was right. For while I want to live up to Christina’s expectations, while I want our democracy to be as good as Christina imagined it, I am much older than she and it has become difficult to see past the cynicism and vitriol.

I had just left my job in the Clinton administration. It was a spring morning. April 19, 1995. A bomb went off at the Alfred P. Murrah building in Oklahoma City.

I did not know, at that moment, what a big part of my professional life that event would become — the first major news story of my journalism career; the many months I would spend in Denver covering the two federal trials of Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols; and the execution of McVeigh another three years after that. All I knew in April 1995 was that 168 people were dead. 19 of them were children. And we knew that this was the worst act of domestic terrorism on U.S. soil, ever.

More charges are expected against the man suspected of killing six people and severely wounding Arizona Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords. Federal prosecutors have already charged 22 year-old Jared Lee Loughner with five felony counts, including attempted assassination of a member of Congress.

One cannot simply read the text of the Constitution and call it a day. The very real danger here is that the new Tea Partiers in Congress (and some of their followers at home) wi...

With just a few hours to go this year, let me add my picks for the most fascinating people of 2010 to the mix:

What's in an @name? Alexandra Petri, a Washington Post columnist and a blogger with ComPost, thinks that your email address says a lot about you. She is joined by a panel of distinguished Brian Lehrer Show guests with retro email addresses who defend their digital identities: Doug Muzzio, professor of political science at Baruch College and host of "City Talk" on CUNY/TV; Siva Vaidhyanathan, associate professor of media studies and law at the University of Virginia; and Jami Floyd, broadcast journalist, legal analyst for cable and network news, and blogger at It's A Free Country.

Are you an email holdout? Defend your @compuserve, @aol, @mindspring... And does someone's email address say anything about them? Do you judge according to their @?

-- A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens

I know it's fashionable to hate the holidays. I think I even heard my neighbor (the one with the dogs who bark at me every morning) mutter “Bah Humbug,” as he passed by in the hallway today.

I refuse, however, to be robbed of my Christmas spirit.  Merry Christmas, I say. And a Happy New Year!

That is why, every year, I sit with my children in the living room (we can’t sit around the hearth because we don’t have hearth) to read A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens. We take turns reading the various parts aloud – Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present and Future, Jacob Marley, Tiny Time and of course Scrooge.

[[Editor's Note: Want to see some WNYC stars perform A Christmas Carol? Of course you do.]]

I don't know how long this will last. My daughter is almost a teenager and will no doubt soon be too cool for such corny family traditions as this; but, for now, the age-old tale helps to remind them that Christmas is about generosity of spirit, kindness and love – not gift-getting.

But wait. What’s all that nonsense? Isn’t this supposed to be a political website? Why all the prattling on about kindness and love?

Well, hang onto your antlers. Don’t get your jingle bells in a bunch. This is a political post.  Dickens was a political writer, and A Christmas Carol is a political story.

Bloggers Karol Markowicz and Jami Floyd, and Rise of the Center founder Solomon Kleinsmith, discuss the latest news and highlight new essays from It's a Free Country.

Ten years ago today, my idealism died. On that cold December day, as I stood in the Tallahassee frost, the United States Supreme Court became, for me, a political body, instead of the neutral, objective and purely jurisprudential body I had always hoped it to be. I was devastated.

December 12, 2000 is a critical date in American history. Yet, it is not a date we commit to memory. It is not a date that lives on in infamy, though it should.