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.

Today marks the sixteenth anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing in which 168 U.S. citizens, including nineteen children, lost their lives.

Timothy McVeigh, a militia movement member, the mastermind of the plot, was seeking revenge against the federal government for the Justice Department’s handling of the Waco siege, which had ended in the deaths of 76 people, exactly two years earlier. He hoped to inspire a revolt against what he considered to be a tyrannical federal government. McVeigh was executed in 2001, but anti-government fanaticism did not die with him.

The lessons of the Bay of Pigs haven’t been learned at all. Since the brilliant disaster, we have been to Vietnam, Cambodia, Grenada, Panama, Iraq, Afghanistan, and back to Iraq aga...

More than 14,000 books that have been written about his presidency and assassination. Why the fascination? Simply put, Lincoln was the greatest president of the world’s greatest dem...

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 week Glenn Beck announced he will leave his daily Fox News show, later this year. But he’s not going anywhere. Not really.

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.

Will the eight women and four men on the jury care about this case any more than taxpayers who have wearied of it after eight years of build-up and millions of dollars spent? It would...

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.

Champions of democracy the world over welcomed the departure of Hosni Mubarak, Friday, with a massive display of joy. Protesters across Cairo savored their victory, and correspondents on TV channels worldwide fought back tears (some, in fact did cry) as they reported the story of a revolution.

I was inspired, instead, to turn to Brother Webster -- as in Webster’s Dictionary, for a little reminder of what all the hoopla was about:

Revolution |n. (pl. s)(Origin Latin revolutio.) a fundamental change in power that takes place in a relatively short period of time.

Given this definition – “a fundamental change in power” perhaps the celebration is a bit premature. I hate to be a spoilsport, but I’m fairly confident that military regime is not what the youth of Egypt had in mind over these last three weeks. And “revolutionary change” is certainly not what has come to Egypt – not yet.