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The EPA left this town in the dust. What happens now?

by CliftonNkb Posted on March 30, 2018

This story was originally published by Mother Jones and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

The residents of Uniontown, a poor, majority-black town in rural Alabama, are used to being ignored by the federal government. For years, they have fought against the Arrowhead landfill, a site that they say is negatively impacting the environment and forcing residents to cope with offensive odors, upper respiratory infections, headaches, and vomiting among other symptoms. The Environmental Protection Agency accepted a civil rights complaint from Uniontown in 2013, but earlier this month, the EPA announced that its External Civil Rights Compliance Office was “resolving and closing” the complaint citing “insufficient evidence” to find that the state violated any civil rights.

Have their options run out? “They’re not giving up by any stretch,” says Marianne Engelman Lado, a Yale University professor who helped represent Uniontown residents. Even after receiving the disappointing news from the EPA, residents are not going to back off. “We will continue to pursue every means that we can,” said Ben Eaton, the vice president of Black Belt Citizens Fighting for Health and Justice. “Uniontown is a good place, with good people, even though we have an uphill battle to fight for our environmental civil rights.”

Toxic waste sites, such as landfills and oil refineries, are more likely to be located in communities of color so the pollution from these sites often has a disproportionate effect on marginalized people. This makes environmental justice an integral part of the civil rights movement. Just weeks after the EPA announcement, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights issued a blistering statement about the EPA’s decision. “Sadly, these dismissals continue the EPA’s disturbing and longstanding track record,” it said. In 2016, the agency released a report that documented the EPA’s dismal failure to enforce civil rights. “We will continue to monitor the EPA’s enforcement of federal civil rights statutes,” the statement said, “and find this is yet another distressing step in the wrong direction for the agency.”

Uniontown is in Alabama’s Black Belt, a region in the central portion of the state that was once dominated by slave owners. The town is majority-black and poor with 48 percent of individuals living below the poverty line. Even before the landfill opened — which was designed to receive waste from over half the country — the people of Uniontown were against it. They formed the Black Belt Citizens Fighting for Health and Justice to stop its construction by suing the Alabama Department of Environmental Management and the Perry County Commission, but a trial judge ruled against them.

Nonetheless, the Arrowhead landfill opened in 2007, and soon after, dust, foul odors, and flies became a part of daily life for the people living nearby. “People talk about how the paint peels from the cars,” Esther Calhoun, the president of the Black Belt Citizens Fighting for Health and Justice, told Grist in 2016. “And there’s dust everywhere, everywhere. There’s buzzards everywhere, too.”

The following year, a disaster hundreds of miles away became Uniontown’s problem. In December 2008, a retaining wall at the Kingston Fossil Plant gave way in the middle of the night and more than 1 billion gallons of coal ash, the toxic byproduct of burning coal, spilled into the Tennessee River and on more than 300 acres of land. Three homes were destroyed and dozens were damaged. Even though no one was killed, the coal ash sludge, which contains hazardous chemicals such as arsenic and mercury, remained and needed to be cleaned up.

In 2009, with the blessing of local leaders and against the wishes of the residents, the Tennessee Valley Authority, the owner of the plant, began shipping its coal ash to the Arrowhead landfill. At the time, Bob Deacy, TVA’s vice president of clean strategies and project development told the New York Times that Arrowhead was chosen because it was accessible by train instead of truck, had the capacity to hold all the coal ash, and local leaders had underbid all the other offers.

Meanwhile, Uniontown residents had mobilized to fight back. In 2012, they filed their first complaint against the Alabama Department of Environmental Management, the agency in charge of issuing permits for the landfill. The complaint alleged that because ADEM permitted the landfill, it was violating Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits recipients of federal funds from taking actions that have disproportionate adverse effects on the basis of race. The complaint described the dire health consequences of living near the landfill, they also said that dust from the coal ash collected on their homes, plants, and cars. The presence of the landfill has decreased property values. After six years, the EPA issued their final decision this month, saying there was insufficient evidence to find any discrimination.

Lawyers working with them suggest that there may still be some legal options. “We are still looking at further legal action,” Claudia Wack, a member of Yale Law’s Environmental Justice Clinic, told the Selma Times-Journal. “We are keeping up the good fight.”

Faced with this setback, residents still are trying to make a difference on the local level by continuing to pressure ADEM. Some have decided to run for office to replace the town leadership that they believe got them into this situation in the first place. Ben Eaton, BBCHJ’s vice president, has been inspired to run for county commissioner to add his voice to those of the commissioners who “originally voted to allow the coal ash to come into Uniontown.” In terms of mounting an effective opposition, Engelman Lado said, running for office is “a really important part of their strategy.”

The Black Belt Citizens Fighting for Health and Justice has also continued to organize actions surrounding environmental concerns in their community. The group has scheduled events to attend Uniontown city council meetings to voice their concerns about pollution and other injustices.

Uniontown residents may not have been surprised about the outcome, given the EPA’s history of ignoring civil rights complaints, but they were still disappointed. “When you go Uniontown, you smell that landfill,” Engelman Lado says. “You don’t need a peer reviewed study to tell you it’s affecting peoples’ lives.”

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The EPA left this town in the dust. What happens now?

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You can expect Neil Gorsuch to be bad news for the environment.

by ByronLandreneau Posted on April 7, 2017

Catherine Flowers has been an environmental justice fighter for as long as she can remember. “I grew up an Alabama country girl,” she says, “so I was part of the environmental movement before I even knew what it was. The natural world was my world.”

In 2001, raw sewage leaked into the yards of poor residents in Lowndes County, Alabama, because they had no access to municipal sewer systems. Local government added insult to injury by threatening 37 families with eviction or arrest because they couldn’t afford septic systems. Flowers, who is from Lowndes County, fought back: She negotiated with state government, including then-Alabama Senator Jeff Sessions, to end unfair enforcement policies, and she enlisted the Environmental Protection Agency’s help to fund septic systems. The effort earned her the nickname “The Erin Brockovich of Sewage.”

Flowers was continuing the long tradition of residents fighting for justice in Lowndes County, an epicenter for the civil rights movement. “My own parents had a rich legacy of fighting for civil rights, which to this day informs my work,” she says. “Even today, people share stories about my parents’ acts of kindness or help, and I feel it’s my duty to carry on their work.”

Years later, untreated and leaking sewage remains a persistent problem in much of Alabama. Flowers advocates for sanitation and environmental rights through the organization she founded, the Alabama Center for Rural Enterprise Community Development Corporation (ACRE, for short). She’s working with the EPA and other federal agencies to design affordable septic systems that will one day eliminate the developing-world conditions that Flowers calls Alabama’s “dirty secret.”

Former Vice President Al Gore counts himself as a big fan of Flowers’ work, calling her “a firm advocate for the poor, who recognizes that the climate crisis disproportionately affects the least wealthy and powerful among us.” Flowers says a soon-to-be-published study, based on evidence she helped collect, suggests that tropical parasites are emerging in Alabama due to poverty, poor sanitation, and climate change. “Our residents can have a bigger voice,” she said, “if the media began reporting how climate change is affecting people living in poor rural communities in 2017.” Assignment editors, pay attention.

Meet all the fixers on this year’s Grist 50.

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You can expect Neil Gorsuch to be bad news for the environment.

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A coal museum in Kentucky is switching to solar power.

by CorazonMcConnel Posted on April 6, 2017

Catherine Flowers has been an environmental justice fighter for as long as she can remember. “I grew up an Alabama country girl,” she says, “so I was part of the environmental movement before I even knew what it was. The natural world was my world.”

In 2001, raw sewage leaked into the yards of poor residents in Lowndes County, Alabama, because they had no access to municipal sewer systems. Local government added insult to injury by threatening 37 families with eviction or arrest because they couldn’t afford septic systems. Flowers, who is from Lowndes County, fought back: She negotiated with state government, including then-Alabama Senator Jeff Sessions, to end unfair enforcement policies, and she enlisted the Environmental Protection Agency’s help to fund septic systems. The effort earned her the nickname “The Erin Brockovich of Sewage.”

Flowers was continuing the long tradition of residents fighting for justice in Lowndes County, an epicenter for the civil rights movement. “My own parents had a rich legacy of fighting for civil rights, which to this day informs my work,” she says. “Even today, people share stories about my parents’ acts of kindness or help, and I feel it’s my duty to carry on their work.”

Years later, untreated and leaking sewage remains a persistent problem in much of Alabama. Flowers advocates for sanitation and environmental rights through the organization she founded, the Alabama Center for Rural Enterprise Community Development Corporation (ACRE, for short). She’s working with the EPA and other federal agencies to design affordable septic systems that will one day eliminate the developing-world conditions that Flowers calls Alabama’s “dirty secret.”

Former Vice President Al Gore counts himself as a big fan of Flowers’ work, calling her “a firm advocate for the poor, who recognizes that the climate crisis disproportionately affects the least wealthy and powerful among us.” Flowers says a soon-to-be-published study, based on evidence she helped collect, suggests that tropical parasites are emerging in Alabama due to poverty, poor sanitation, and climate change. “Our residents can have a bigger voice,” she said, “if the media began reporting how climate change is affecting people living in poor rural communities in 2017.” Assignment editors, pay attention.

Meet all the fixers on this year’s Grist 50.

Source article: 

A coal museum in Kentucky is switching to solar power.

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Victory! A coal company just abandoned its plan to ruin a river and a bunch of people’s lives in Alaska.

by CooperShaver678 Posted on April 5, 2017

Catherine Flowers has been an environmental justice fighter for as long as she can remember. “I grew up an Alabama country girl,” she says, “so I was part of the environmental movement before I even knew what it was. The natural world was my world.”

In 2001, raw sewage leaked into the yards of poor residents in Lowndes County, Alabama, because they had no access to municipal sewer systems. Local government added insult to injury by threatening 37 families with eviction or arrest because they couldn’t afford septic systems. Flowers, who is from Lowndes County, fought back: She negotiated with state government, including then-Alabama Senator Jeff Sessions, to end unfair enforcement policies, and she enlisted the Environmental Protection Agency’s help to fund septic systems. The effort earned her the nickname “The Erin Brockovich of Sewage.”

Flowers was continuing the long tradition of residents fighting for justice in Lowndes County, an epicenter for the civil rights movement. “My own parents had a rich legacy of fighting for civil rights, which to this day informs my work,” she says. “Even today, people share stories about my parents’ acts of kindness or help, and I feel it’s my duty to carry on their work.”

Years later, untreated and leaking sewage remains a persistent problem in much of Alabama. Flowers advocates for sanitation and environmental rights through the organization she founded, the Alabama Center for Rural Enterprise Community Development Corporation (ACRE, for short). She’s working with the EPA and other federal agencies to design affordable septic systems that will one day eliminate the developing-world conditions that Flowers calls Alabama’s “dirty secret.”

Former Vice President Al Gore counts himself as a big fan of Flowers’ work, calling her “a firm advocate for the poor, who recognizes that the climate crisis disproportionately affects the least wealthy and powerful among us.” Flowers says a soon-to-be-published study, based on evidence she helped collect, suggests that tropical parasites are emerging in Alabama due to poverty, poor sanitation, and climate change. “Our residents can have a bigger voice,” she said, “if the media began reporting how climate change is affecting people living in poor rural communities in 2017.” Assignment editors, pay attention.

Meet all the fixers on this year’s Grist 50.

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Victory! A coal company just abandoned its plan to ruin a river and a bunch of people’s lives in Alaska.

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The Head of Jeb’s Super PAC Is Tired of the Endless Conservative Con

by SherryKifarsy Posted on March 19, 2016

Mother Jones

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Mike Murphy is a longtime Jeb Bush friend and loyalist, and he’s also the guy who ran Right to Rise, the Super PAC that blew through $100 million in an epically futile effort to sell Bush to the masses. So it’s understandable that he might be a little bitter about the success of Donald Trump, who almost single-handedly destroyed Bush.

Keep that in mind when you read Matt Labash’s long debriefing of Murphy as he was cleaning up the last remnants of the Right to Rise offices a month ago. At the same time, Murphy is neither a rookie nor a naif, and that gives him a deep perspective on what’s changed over the years in the conservative movement. He acknowledges that Republican voters have grown angrier over the past decade, but he blames a lot of this on Republicans themselves, aided and abetted by a press that barely understands politics anymore and is eager to jack up its ratings by scaring the hell out of people:

He says a lot of the anger is springing from people’s fears and hard realities — the middle class not getting a raise in a decade. Generally pessimistic older white voters see the demographic shifts and don’t like it. The media are incessantly “sticking red-hot thermometers in lukewarm water and saying, ‘Wow, that water’s pretty hot!’ “

….Still, Murphy adds, the problem with our current antiestablishment climate isn’t that people aren’t correctly identifying problems. It’s that the problem-solvers they’re turning to are bigger snake-oil hustlers than the ones they’re turning away from….Let’s think through Trump, Murphy says. “He doesn’t understand the presidency. You don’t call up the head of Mexico and say, ‘Hey, I’m going to build a fabulous wall with first-class gold toilets and you’re gonna pay for it.’…He has no understanding of presidential powers. He has no understanding of Congress. It’s like putting a chimp in the driver’s seat of a tractor.”

….”Then the problem becomes how are we the world’s reserve currency anymore? We get away with a lot of shit because people think we have a stable system….We borrow a lot of f — ing money. Because people think the number one safest instrument in the world is the U.S. Treasury bond. And if we start making reality-show clowns in charge? Run on the American bank. You think the pissed-off steelworker in Akron has trouble now? Wait until we have a financial collapse and they take 25 percent off the dollar. He’ll be serving hot dogs in an American restaurant in China.”

….Murphy starts waxing philosophic….Everything is so postmodern and meta that “nothing means anything, because everything is what the scam is….So many simpleton reporters — whose depth of knowledge extends to whatever they read in the Real Clear Politics polls average that morning. Fly-by-night pollsters feeding the media, which is creating news so that they can report on it.

….I suggest to Murphy that many of these things he’s decrying have been the tricks of his trade. He’s like a magician denouncing the false-bottomed top hat. “I don’t mind technique,” he says. “I can be shameless. I have a long career at this. But when everything is a short con, then there’s never another short con. Because you need trust, and you’ve destroyed it.“….

….The cable-news business establishment who are, whatever they insist, for Trump, since Trump equals ratings….But just as notable, he points out, is the antiestablishment establishment….”Like, Antiestablishment Inc.,” Murphy says. “You can find them at 123 Establishment Lane, Des Moines, Iowa. Often, they’re involved with the postage meter or credit card machine somewhere for small-dollar donations.“

….Take, for instance, he says, the Tea Party — “a racket, though it’s supposed to be a nonracket,” full of faux four-star generals who say, ” ‘You’ve got to pay me because . . . I represent the Nebraska sub-Army 14 of the Tea Party.’ “…Murphy concedes there are lots of voters who “subscribe to a loose set of principles that D.C.’s broken. They’re tired of the establishment. Tired of people in the racket.” But there’s a racket of people sending them letters asking for money. “The poor old lady sends her $25 to defeat Nancy Pelosi, and $22 of it goes to ‘fundraising costs.’ “

Rick Perlstein in particular has written a lot about how the modern conservative movement has largely turned into a machine for swindling people—especially the elderly. There’s Glenn Beck pitching gold as a hedge against nonexistent hyperinflation. Fred Thompson hawking reverse mortgages. The acolytes of direct-mail pioneer Richard Viguerie setting up operations that scare the bejeesus out of old people but use most of the money they raise to pay themselves and their consultants. The talk radio hosts who repeatedly insinuate that Hillary Clinton murdered Vince Foster—and then quickly break for a commercial. Mike Huckabee peddling diabetes cures and Ben Carson praising the glories of glyconutrients to their evangelical fans. The endless production of simpleminded right-wing books as a handy income stream, some of them with more than the usual whiff of corruption.

Even some conservatives have finally started to recognize that the short con—which is elderly enough that it’s become a long con—is hurting the conservative cause. Mike Murphy is apparently one of them, and he considers the rise of Donald Trump little more than just desserts for a party that’s either tolerated or actively encouraged this behavior for decades. In the end, Trump took a look at the conservative movement and decided that they were amateurs. The big con needs more than talk radio or direct mail or scary ads. It needs national TV provided willingly and often—and Trump knew exactly how that game worked. He’s not running his con any differently than conservatives always have. He just knows how to pull it off way better than they do.

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The Head of Jeb’s Super PAC Is Tired of the Endless Conservative Con

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It’s True: Smart People Would Prefer You Went Away

by glasulmaramuresuluianunturi Posted on March 19, 2016

Mother Jones

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Most people are happier when they have a lot of social contact. But Christopher Ingraham points to a new paper suggesting an exception to this general rule: smart people, true to stereotype, prefer being left alone. But why?

I posed this question to Carol Graham, a Brookings Institution researcher who studies the economics of happiness. “The findings in here suggest (and it is no surprise) that those with more intelligence and the capacity to use it … are less likely to spend so much time socializing because they are focused on some other longer term objective,” she said.

Think of the really smart people you know. They may include a doctor trying to cure cancer or a writer working on the great American novel or a human rights lawyer working to protect the most vulnerable people in society. To the extent that frequent social interaction detracts from the pursuit of these goals, it may negatively affect their overall satisfaction with life.

To put this a little less nicely, average folks don’t really have anything very interesting or enthralling to do with themselves, so getting interrupted by friends represents a net improvement in their daily lives. Smart people do have enthralling—even obsessive—intellectual interests, and social activities take them away from that. So this represents a net loss in happiness.

(Important note for smart, argumentative people reading this: we’re talking about averages here. There are plenty of extroverted smart people and introverted dumb people. But on average, smart people tend to dislike socializing because it takes them away from work they find more rewarding.)

But back to the paper. The authors, Satoshi Kanazawa and Norman Li, have a different theory about all this: the measured difference in social preferences is all due to the way we evolved way back on the savanna. Back then, they say, you had a much better chance of surviving if you had lots of friends, so we naturally evolved to value having lots of friends. Things have changed since then—cell phones, computers, cities, houses, etc.—and even though evolution hasn’t yet had a chance to adapt to a world where social contact isn’t as important, “extremely intelligent” people can use their sheer brainpower to adapt anyway:

“More intelligent individuals, who possess higher levels of general intelligence and thus greater ability to solve evolutionarily novel problems, may face less difficulty in comprehending and dealing with evolutionarily novel entities and situations,” they write….Smarter people may be better-equipped to jettison that whole hunter-gatherer social network — especially if they’re pursuing some loftier ambition.

This odd thing is that this isn’t really an application of evolutionary psychology, even though the authors are evolutionary psychologists. The hypothesis that humans evolved in hierarchical, medium-sized groups that relied on tight social networks for survival is pretty widely accepted. It’s nothing new. What’s new is the suggestion that smart people can overcome the constraints of cognitive evolution more easily than most people. And that’s not really evolutionary psychology. It’s just regular old psychology, or perhaps regular old neuroscience. It’s pretty likely that this has always been true of smart people, but we just don’t know it. Our social science datasets are shockingly inadequate for dates before 20,000 BCE.

Now, I don’t have access to the paper itself, and it’s possible that the authors address this. The abstract doesn’t give any hint of it, though. For the time being, then, I’ll take this as a fairly banal observation: people with intense intellectual interests value them more highly than social contact, and almost by definition, it’s mostly smart people who have intense intellectual interests. As a refugee from the tech world who dealt with a lot of programmers, and as a blogger who gets annoyed at being interrupted in the middle of writing a post, color me unsurprised.

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It’s True: Smart People Would Prefer You Went Away

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Friday Cat Blogging – 18 March 2016

by MaryjoWollstonec Posted on March 18, 2016

Mother Jones

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Today is wildlife watching day. Our squirrel is sitting calmly on our fence snacking on something or other, and the cats are fascinated. They are extremely dedicated to the study of small, local ecologies—with an emphasis on fauna rather than flora.

In non-feline news, I was prepared to link to some baby rhino cuteness, but instead my sister recommends this video of a dog trying to get its human to play fetch. I hate to admit it, but dogs really are smarter than cats. Until they learn to purr, though, cats will always have the edge.

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Friday Cat Blogging – 18 March 2016

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A Few Wee Questions

by WendellFBQX Posted on March 17, 2016

Mother Jones

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I’m a little confused:

I understand why Donald Trump pulled out of today’s scheduled debate. He figures there’s nothing in it for him. But why did John Kasich pull out? Does he figure he’s so well known by now that he no longer needs free publicity?
Why can’t Donald Trump find any foreign policy advisors? Sure, as best we can tell his foreign policy is juvenile and erratic, which probably puts off most competent foreign policy hands. But what about the less competent ones? Or the ambitious little gits who just want to hook up with a winner? Why can’t he lure any of those folks into his tent?
Why doesn’t Merrick Garland figure out a way to quietly leak the notion that he’s opposed to abortion and thinks Roe v. Wade is bad law? He has no track record on abortion, so it would seem perfectly plausible. That would really put Republicans in a tough spot, wouldn’t it?

That’s all for now.

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A Few Wee Questions

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Quote of the Day: The Middle Class Doesn’t Care If We Cut Taxes on the Rich

by NatishaRoney Posted on March 17, 2016

Mother Jones

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From House Speaker Paul Ryan, talking about his view of tax reform:

I do not like the idea of buying into these distributional tables.

“These distributional tables” are the ones that show Republican tax plans giving enormous cuts to the wealthy and nothing much at all to the middle class. Ryan calls them ridiculous because once you account for the economic boom of Republican tax cuts for the rich, everyone is going to be rolling in dough. Besides which, Ryan insists, “I think most people don’t think, ‘John’s success comes at my expense.'” Bottom line: distributional tables are for losers. “Bernie Sanders talks about that stuff. That’s not who we are.”

On a more amusing note, Ryan says he’s not looking at how to fund a border wall. “Remember, we’re not going to pay for that, recall?” So true.

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Quote of the Day: The Middle Class Doesn’t Care If We Cut Taxes on the Rich

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Hillary Clinton’s Trust Gap Is Killing Her With Millennials

by MelissaEOLV Posted on March 10, 2016

Mother Jones

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Earlier today I was musing over a tweet from a guy who said that his daughter’s friends all loathed Hillary Clinton. Just really, really couldn’t stand her. This is obviously a fairly common sentiment. Bernie Sanders didn’t win 80 percent of the millennial vote in Michigan just because he’s an idealistic liberal. The only way you get to a number like that is against an opponent who’s pretty seriously disliked.

But why? The most obvious reason millennials dislike Hillary so strongly is that they think she’s too slippery. “I feel like Clinton lies a lot,” a college student told PBS a few weeks ago. “She changes her views for every group she speaks to. I can’t trust her.” Quotes like that litter the internet, and in tonight’s debate Karen Tumulty asked about it yet again. “Is there anything in your own actions and the decisions that you yourself have made that would foster this kind of mistrust?”

People of my age find all this a little peculiar. After all, we’re the ones who experienced the full storm of the 90s. There was a new Hillary “scandal” on practically a monthly basis back then, and even if you later learned there was virtually nothing to any of them, that kind of nonstop mudslinging leaves a mark. It’s hard to hear this stuff over and over and not think that maybe there’s something there. Smoke and fire, you know. But millennials went through none of that. So why do they distrust her?

Unfortunately, Hillary has fostered a lot of this mistrust herself. I’m going to be wildly unfair here and cherry pick a bunch of quotes from Hillary and Bernie Sanders. First up, here’s Bernie:

On whether he supports fracking: “My answer is a lot shorter. No, I do not support fracking.”
On reforming Wall Street: “If a bank is too big to fail, it is too big to exist….Within one year, my administration will break these institutions up so that they no longer pose a grave threat to the economy.”
On whether there’s even a “single circumstance” in which abortion should be illegal: “That is a decision to be made by the woman, her physician and her family. That’s my view.”
On prison reform: “I promise at the end of my first term we won’t have more people in jail than in any other country.”

There’s no nuance here, no shading. Bernie has simple, crowd-pleasing answers to every question. He’s for X, full stop. He’s against Y, end of story.

At this point I should compare these answers to the more gray-shaded responses Hillary gives on policy questions. But I’m not being fair, so instead you get this:

On whether she lied to the Benghazi families (from tonight’s debate): “You know, look, I feel a great deal of sympathy for the families of the four brave Americans that we lost at Benghazi….”
On releasing transcripts of her speeches: “Let everybody who’s ever given a speech to any private group under any circumstances release them—we’ll all release them at the same time.”
On her private email server: “Everything I did was permitted. There was no law. There was no regulation. There was nothing that did not give me the full authority to decide how I was going to communicate.”
On getting money from big Wall Street donors: “I represented New York on 9/11 when we were attacked. Where were we attacked? We were attacked in downtown Manhattan where Wall Street is. I did spend a whole lot of time and effort helping them rebuild. That was good for New York. It was good for the economy and it was a way to rebuke the terrorists who had attacked our country.”
On her super PAC: “You’re referring to a super PAC that we don’t coordinate with….It’s not my PAC.”

These are terrible answers. Tonight, Jorge Ramos brought up allegations by the Benghazi families that Hillary had deceived them, and asked, “Secretary Clinton, did you lie to them?” The only answer to this question is “Of course not.” But Hillary started by expressing her sympathy for the Benghazi families and only then said of her accuser, “She’s wrong.” Maybe this seems like nitpicking, but it’s not. Unless the very first words out of her mouth are “Of course not,” she’s going to leave an immediate impression that she’s about to tap dance around the whole thing. I like Hillary, and even I sighed when she began delivering that answer.

The other quotes are similar. It doesn’t even matter if they’re the truth. They don’t sound like the truth. People my age might forgive Hillary a bit of this lawyerlyness because we remember the 90s and understand the damage that even a slightly misplaced word can cause. But millennials don’t. They just see another tired establishment pol who never gives a straight answer about anything.

Life isn’t fair. Politics isn’t fair. I think Hillary Clinton is careful, a little bit paranoid, and, ironically, congenitally honest on policy issues. She just can’t bring herself to give simple-minded answers when she knows perfectly well the truth is more complicated. But especially this year, when her competition is a guy like Bernie Sanders, this just makes her look evasive and insincere.

After 40 years in the public eye, I don’t know why Hillary is still so bad at this. But she is. For a long time, liberals mostly forgave her wary speaking style because they were keenly aware of the Republican smear campaign that birthed it. Now, for the first time, there’s a generation of liberals who don’t care about any of that. And an awful lot of them loathe her.

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Hillary Clinton’s Trust Gap Is Killing Her With Millennials

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