NURSE HAS LONG NAILS AND NO GLOVES? NO PROBLEM, SAYS UNION: So imagine you are the patient and your nurse comes in to change the dressing on your incision. You notice she’s not wearing latex gloves. And worse, she has long artificial fingernails, which are known to harbor potentially lethal germs. What do you do?

What you do is shut up and take it, according to the American Federation of Government Employees, which represents Federal Bureau of Prisons employees. When managers at the Rochester, Minn., facilities announced a rule banning employees with such fingernails from working with certain patients, the union balked.

After negotiations failed, the issue had to be resolved by federal arbiters. Luke Rosiak of the Daily Caller News Foundation Investigative Group reports the unexpected details of the arbiters’ decisions.

LAWYERS FOR ENVIRONMENTAL ACTIVISTS GROUPS GET MILLIONS IN TAX DOLLARS: They do it by filing “citizen suits” demanding more regulation by the Environmental Protection Agency, Department of Interior and other federal agencies, according to Michael Bastasch and Ethan Barton of the Daily Caller News Foundation.

The suits are authorized – some might say invited – under the Endangered Species Act (ESA), Clean Air Act (CAA) and Clean Water Act (CWA), among others. These “sue and settle” legal charades happen behind closed doors where the lawyers for the activists groups confer with lawyers for the government to work out a “settlement.”

The lawyers fees for the plaintiffs are paid by the taxpayers, a provision of the laws which provides a significant incentive to do as many depositions and file the maximum number of motions before the settlement talks commence.

“Federal agencies paid out $30 million to attorneys for 237 citizen suits under the ESA. Citizen suits under CAA paid out the second most, at $13 million for 224 suits, and the 51 CWA suits resulted in $6.7 million in federal payments,” according to Bastasch and Barton.

The Sierra Club is the most frequent user the provision, suing federal agencies 34 times between 2009 and 2012, often represented by Earthjustice, which was spun-off of the club in 1997.

“Earthjustice has received $4 million from suing federal agencies 39 times since 2009, according to TheDCNF’s findings. The group declined to speak with TheDCNF when asked about getting attorney’s fees paid for when suing the government,” according to Bastasch and Barton.

VA HOSPITAL BOUGHT $311,000 IN TVS “BECAUSE THEY HAD FUNDS AVAILABLE:”  Taxpayers give bureaucrats money so bureaucrats can spend it just because they have it. That’s apparently the attitude the prompted officials at the Department of Veterans Affairs Detroit hospital to buy $311,000 worth of TVs that were never used and ended up in storage.

Luke Rosiak of the Daily Caller News Foundation Investigative Group reports that the TVs were bought in 2013 and intended for use in a new patient area to be constructed. Three years later and the new patient area has yet to be built and the warranties on the unused TVs have expired.

HILLARY AIDE OKAYED ABU DHABI DEAL THAT PAID BILL $500,000 FOR A SPEECH: Richard Nixon had an 18-minute gap in a tape recording that was well and truly erased. Hillary Clinton has thousands of emails that were deleted but can never be erased. Slowly but surely, they are seeing the light of day and they are revealing.

The latest emails exposed are from 2012 and they shed new light on how the Clintons used their offices to enrich themselves through the Clinton Foundation, according to the Daily Caller News Foundation Investigative Group’s Richard Pollock. TAQA is an Abu Dhabi-based oil and gas company with operations in 11 countries, including the U.S. and Canada.

“The emails show foundation officials were trying to complete a deal offered by TAQA managing director Leo Koot in Scotland. He agreed to give $60,000 to the foundation for Bill to speak at a Scotland charity and auction. The winner of the auction was to get a ‘Special Day with President Bill Clinton in New York,'” Pollock reports.

“The foundation accepted the $60,000, and Bill went to Scotland where he received an additional $250,000 to $500,000 for his speech before a group called ‘Business For Change,’ according to the Foundation’s website,” Pollock said.

Cheryl Mills, Hillary’s Chief of Staff, okayed the deal in private discussions with Clinton Foundation officials while her boss was in Bangladesh publicly defending another Clinton Foundation donor who was in hot water in that country over questionable accounting of government funds. And so on and so on and so on and …..

WHAT JOB PAYS THE MOST FOR DOING THE LEAST WORK? Try running a local public housing authority in a small town like Linden, New Jersey, Clayton, Oklahoma or Mabank, Texas. Your paycheck is funded by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development and odds are you’ll only have a handful of housing units to oversee.

“The executive director of the Housing Authority of the City of Linden, New Jersey, for example, drew $295,000 a year for overseeing 200 government-owned housing project apartments and 350 Section 8 vouchers redeemed with private landlords,” reports Luke Rosiak of the Daily Caller News Foundation Investigative Group.

“That’s more than the same position makes in poverty-plagued Newark with 25 times as many residents, and more than the position in major cities like Washington, D.C. and Los Angeles, according to HUD’s Public Housing Authority Executive Compensation database covering 2014, the most recent available year.”

The Mabank ED’s salary is only $47,005, but then overseeing a mere 16 public housing units means the job pays nearly $3,000 per unit managed. It’s not a time-consuming job, why not have a second job? Down in Marietta, GA., the ED got $242,000 in salary, plus a $50,000 bonus!

Rosiak’s story is only the latest in a long line of exposes of waste, fraud, venality and outrages at HUD that puts it in the same infamous league of Big Government incompetence as the Department of Veterans Affairs.

MOST GENEROUS CITIES ARE ALSO MOST CHURCH-GOING: The Daily Caller News Foundation’s Thomas Phippen looks at a new Barna Group data analysis that found some huge surprises among the nation’s 50 most generous cities. Take El Paso, for example, where 92 percent of the adults in that Texas border metropolis donate to charity regularly, most through local churches.

If you are guessing there is a connection between church attendance and generosity, you got it. Just imagine how America’s social welfare scene would change if 92 percent of the adults living in the 50 largest cities were as generous as those in El Paso.

DID AUSSIE GOVERNMENT GIVE CLINTON FOUNDATION $20M, $50M OR $88M? The disclosures are all over the map on this question and the confusion reflects the apparent impossibility of knowing who gave how much when to Bill and Hillary’s favorite “charity.” Or into whose pocket the money was deposited after it was given.

Rep. Marsha Blackburn, who led the House effort that prompted the IRS to investigate the Clinton Foundation, told the Daily Caller News Foundation Investigative Group that the foundation “has failed to accurately report tens of millions of dollars in foreign government grants, including some while Hillary Clinton was secretary of state.” Such reporting failure is a federal crime and also under multiple state charitable laws and regulations.

And the drip, drip, drip continues.

GINNIE MAE HIRED A FAKE CPA TO RUN A $1.5 TRILLION MORTGAGE PORTFOLIO: No, Luke Rosiak of the Daily Caller News Foundation Investigative Group is not making this one up. Officials at the Government National Mortgage Association — aka Ginnie Mae – hired David Fender as vice president and chief financial officer in April 2014.

They did this despite a background check that revealed Fender’s highly dubious credentials, including falsely claiming to be a registered CPA, being fired from his previous job for working for another company on company time, and much, much more.

“Fender was hired as Ginnie Mae’s CFO despite an undistinguished resume of failed business deals in Japan and jobs with U.S. companies he didn’t keep for long. His pet project was Cold Energy Systems, which sells steel tanks to governments,” Rosiak reports.

“The reference check done during Fender’s Ginnie Mae background investigation revealed his penchant for taking and neglecting corporate jobs to pay the bills while he brokered big-dollar side deals.” And then there was that $128 million tax deficiency he claimed not to know about. Sleep tight tonight, folks, because your Government Sponsored Entities are in the best of hands.

MEDIA MATTERS FLINGS ANOTHER FACT-FREE SALVO DEFENDING CLINTON: David Brock, Hillary Clinton’s favorite attack dog, had his minions at Media Matters for America fire off another cluster of half-truths, evasions and vituperation at a journalism outfit with the temerity to report facts about the Clinton Foundation. But this one sets a new low mark for ignoring facts that are no less obvious than Brock’s obeisance to Hillary Clinton.

ARE EPA OFFICIALS LYING TO US OR THEMSELVES? Here’s why that’s a reasonable question: The fact the same EPA that recently said the Gold King Mine region of Colorado should be declared a Superfund cleanup area because of fish kills caused by mine waste also published its own internal study saying fish kills in the area were happening before any mines were ever dug there.

After fighting it at every previous turn, residences of the Colorado mining region recently succumbed to the EPA’s long campaign to win the Superfund designation, which, according to the Daily Caller News Foundation Investigative Group’s Ethan Barton, gives the federal agency immense economic power in the area. But that may change with Barton’s revelation of EPA’s contradictory evidence.

BELIEVE IT OR NOT, THERE IS REAL NEWS OUTSIDE OF CLEVELAND: Take, for example, the Government Accountability Office’s report that the cost of tax breaks for special interests, $1.2 trillion, now exceeds the cost of discretionary spending, $1.1 trillion, in the federal budget last year.

Then there’s sentencing of Warren Graves to three years in prison and a fine of $55,000? Who is Graves and what crime did he do? He was a key aide to three District of Columbia mayors, including most notably the infamous Marion Barry, and Vincent Gray, whose campaign was plagued by allegations of serious campaign finance abuses. What Graves did is filing a false tax return.

WHAT DO YOU GET WHEN YOU COMBINE insider self-dealing, hypocrisy, rosy scenarios, empty promises and influence peddling? The Clinton Foundation. Check out today’s expose by the Daily Caller News Foundation Investigative Group’s Richard Pollock. Maybe that’s why, for example, the foundation spent $12.6 million celebrating a Bill Clinton birthday, then reported it as a “fund-raising” expense.

“LAW AND ORDER” OR “THE RULE OF LAW?” DO HILLARY OR THE DONALD KNOW? That’s the question posed today by The Daily Gouge in assessing the reactions of Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump to the ambush assassination of three Baton Rouge police officers Saturday.

“No, Hillary, the only people turning their backs on anything are you and your former boss; and it’s the rule of law in America, both through your words and actions.  And THAT, Donald, is what we need, not law and order.  Rule by an impartial application of the law and order will naturally follow as surely as night does day; whether in the realm of violent crime, immigration or government email security.”

Much more well worth perusing here.

IS VA EVEN WORSE THAN WE THINK? Apparently so, at least if a new Government Accounting Office analysis of how often federal agencies incorrectly issue benefit checks is accurate. Two VA benefit programs were wrong more than half the time, GAO reports. The congressional watchdog agency tracks incorrect benefit payments across the federal government.

“Those are by far the highest error rates for any federal program GAO analyzed for its latest annual improper payments report. The Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) program for low-income families had the third-worst improper payment rate, but wasted far more tax dollars — $15.6 billion of $65.6 billion in total payments, or 23.78 percent,” according to Katie Watson of the Daily Caller News Foundation Investigative Group.

NUMBERS DON’T LIE – THOUSANDS OF MARYLANDERS ARE RIPPING OFF D.C. SCHOOLS: Liars can use numbers, to be sure, but Luke Rosiak and Katie Watson of the Daily Caller News Foundation Investigative Group simply quote official data and draw the obvious conclusion.

“District of Columbia public and charter elementary schools have more students attending classes than the federal city’s entire population of such school-aged kids, indicating a fraud rate of at least 11 percent,” according to Rosiak and Watson. They previously documented in a  six-part series linked on their story posted today that the fraudsters are mainly from Maryland.

“The District of Columbia’s seemingly flippant attitude toward stopping Maryland parents from illegally enrolling students in D.C. public and charter schools not only robs thousands of children on waiting lists of the education they paid for, but it also cheats D.C. taxpayers out of benefits intended for local residents,” Tom Schatz, a Capitol Hill resident who leads the nonprofit activist group Citizens Against Government Waste, told The Daily Caller News Foundation.

Federal taxpayers have a huge stake in this problem, too, because Uncle Sam spends hundreds of millions of dollars on D.C. every year, much of it aiding the local public schools. “Annual per capita spending on D.C. is more than $16,000, compared to Alaska, which receives the second-highest amount of nearly $5,000, according to the Census Bureau,” Rosiak and Watson report.

RETIRED LT. GEN. MICHAEL T. FLYNN WAS PRESIDENT OBAMA’S DEFENSE INTEL CHIEF from 2012 to 2014, so he knows firsthand what the War on Terrorism is about and what is required to defeat the savages known as “ISIS.” Flynn’s assessment (given prior to the Nice terrorist horrors) is simple: “We are in a war … We are losing.”

Flynn and historian Michael Ledeen co-authored a book that hit the shelves earlier this week that is as timely as it could be, as seen in the title:“The Field of Flight: How We Can Win the Global War Against Radical Islam and Its Allies.” The book quickly rose to the top ranks of the Amazon sales chart.

In a wide-ranging interview Thursday with Richard Pollock of the Daily Caller News Foundation, Flynn said what is needed is “’an entirely new strategy, and intelligence must drive this. Good intelligence has to start with properly and clearly defining this enemy.’ The new president has to use the term radical Islam within all military, intelligence and law enforcement agencies. ‘Within the government, within the Department of Justice, the Department of Defense, you have practically eliminated any training or any use of the term ‘radical Islam.’”

In a separate interview, Ledeen told Pollock that “It’s not just radical Islam. It’s radical Islam, plus their radical, secular allies North Korea, Russia, China, Cuba. So we’re fighting a global alliance which is coming after us. We should stand up for our own values and waging political war against them as we did against the communism and fascism in the last century.”

And in one of most needed but totally un-PC comments of 2016, Ledeen insisted that “Muslim civilization is a failure. There were more books translated into Spanish in the last year than into Arabic in the last thousand years. You’re dealing with a failed culture.”

A 30-YEAR-OLD ST. LOUIS SUPERFUND SITE POSES “EXTREME HEALTH RISKS” FOR CHILDREN: That’s according to Missouri Republican Rep. Ann Wagner. Unfortunately, as the Daily Caller News Foundation Investigative Group’s Ethan Barton has exhaustively reported, the Missouri kids are far from alone.

“’The EPA has failed, failed more than 30 years in its cleanup of nuclear waste dating back to the Manhattan Project and World War II,’ she said. The Superfund process ‘and particularly the EPA have failed the people of St. Louis in the most heartless manner possible,’” Barton reports this morning. Her comments came during a House Energy and Commerce Committee panel hearing.

“The EPA’s Superfund program was created in 1980 to clean up America’s most polluted locations, but 329 sites could still threaten humans, according to EPA data. Only about one-third of the 1,328 Superfund sites have been completely cleaned,” according to Barton. Those that have been cleaned took on average 13 years to complete the process.

Illinois Republican Rep. John Shimkus pointed out during the hearing that “Superfund is now some 36 years old and the truth is some cleanup projects that we are working on seem as old as the law itself,” according to Barton. The bureaucratic inefficiencies of the Superfund program are the problem, Shimkus suggested.

Several Democrats on the panel, as well as EPA Assistant Administrator Mathy Stanislaus, agreed that Superfund cleanup delays are harmful and unnecessary. Their solution? Restore a Superfund tax they estimate would generate more than $25 billion by 2026. EPA currently spends $1 billion annually on Superfund.

PC DISEASE SPREADING AT REPUBLICAN NATIONAL CONVENTION: A giant billboard promoting a Christian movie, “God’s Not Dead 2,” was planned for display during the GOP convention in Cleveland, but then the advertising firm involved caved because mentioning divine judgement is “incendiary” in a generation raised on the myth that people have a right never to be offended by words in the commercial or news media.

“The billboard, 32 feet high and 60 feet wide, would have been draped over a downtown Cleveland building with a photo of actress Melissa Joan Hart and the quote, ‘I’d rather stand with God and be judged by the world than stand with the world and be judged by God,’” according to Kaitlin Collins of the Daily Caller.

“However, after much negotiation, the billboard company Orange Barrel Media has decided the message is too ‘incendiary.’ (Side note: the movie stars Mike Huckabee.),” Collins said, citing the Hollywood Reporter. “According to emails obtained by the Hollywood Reporter, the billboard company said it didn’t like the ‘judged by God’ message because it was ‘too political’ and ‘way too incendiary.’”

How long before presumptive GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump is asked his position on the position?

SURPRISED? HOLDER BLOCKED PROSECUTION OF HSBC IN DRUG CARTEL MONEY LAUNDERING: Former Attorney General Eric Holder blocked filing of charges against financial industry giant HSBC that were recommended by career Department of Justice attorneys. That’s just one of the findings of a majority staff report by the House Financial Services Committee.

Holder “and his senior staff allowed HSBC to settle over the bank’s money laundering oversight failures rather than face criminal charges. They then ‘misled’ Congress as to why the DOJ failed to prosecute HSBC” in 2012, reports the Daily Caller News Foundation Investigative Group’s Katie Watson.

The report was titled “Too Big To Jail: Inside the Obama Justice Department’s Decision Not to Hold Wall Street Accountable.” As Glenn Reynolds would say, they told us “too big to fail” banks would be above the law if Barack Obama wasn’t elected President in 2008 and re-elected in 2012.

PRESSURE GROWS FOR PUBLIC CORRUPTION PROBE OF “LAWLESS, PAY-TO-PLAY” CLINTON FOUNDATION: Rep. Marsha Blackburn, R-TN, is circulating a draft letter from GOP colleagues in the House of Representative to investigate a “pattern of dealing that personally enriched the Clintons at the expense of American foreign policy,” according to Richard Pollock of the Daily Caller News Foundation Investigative Group.

The letter will go when completed to FBI Director James Comey, IRS Commissioner John Koskinen and Federal Trade Commission Chairman Edith Ramirez. A major focus of the letter is the relationship of the Foundation to for-profit giant Laureate Education.

“Laureate paid Bill Clinton $16.5 million for a part-time job as ‘honorary chancellor’ beginning in 2010, a year after Hillary Clinton joined the Department of State. Laureate also contributed between $1 million to $5 million to the Clinton Foundation, according to the foundation’s web site.

“During that same time, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) awarded $55 million to the International Youth Foundation, a unit run by David Becker, Laureate’s founder. The USAID is part of the State Department,” Pollock reports.

Blackburn’s effort comes hard on the heels of another House GOP missive in which 200 signers demand that Comey explain why he opted not to recommend prosecution of Hillary Clinton for violating anti-espionage and classification security laws by using a private email and server to conduct official U.S. government business while Secretary of State.

CLINTON FOUNDATION’S CAPTIVE ACCOUNTING FIRM PROSECUTED BY SEC: And that’s not all. BKD, the small accounting firm Bill Clinton selected and kept for years to do his foundation’s books, was also prosecuted by the FDIC, according to Richard Pollock of the Daily Caller News Foundation Investigative Group.

The SEC and FDIC prosecutions were “for ‘unprofessional conduct’ and ‘gross negligence,’ according to federal court documents. And the Public Company Oversight Accounting Board (PCOAB), the nation’s top federal oversight agency for American accounting firms, reported that BKD violated auditor independence rules over the years, which its inspectors reported as ‘significant deficiencies,’” according to Pollock.

The foundation switched to PriceWaterhouseCoopers in 2013 and restated its tax filings for 2010 through 2014. Pollock quotes Wall Street whistle blower Charles Ortel saying the restatements suggest there was a “a long pattern of gross negligence and willful malfeasance on the part of the trustees” who kept BKD for more than a decade.

Why did Clinton choose BKD and keep it around for so long? Pollock reports for the first time anywhere that the former president “chose the Little Rock, Arkansas office of BKD in 2001 during construction of his presidential library there. Even then there were signs of conflicts of interest as BKD was also the auditor for the construction company’s parent company. In addition, the parent company’s chief financial officer also served on BKD’s official management committee.”

Just another cozy, crooked Clinton deal.

FEDERAL EMPLOYEE UNIONS DEMAND HUUUUGE PAY HIKE: They already make on average 78 percent more than private sector works – counting salary and the value of benefits – but a coalition of federal employee unions claim they deserve a 5.3 percent pay raise, reports Katie Watson of the Daily Caller News Foundation Investigative Group.

“At a time when we need to recruit the best and brightest to civil service, federal pay is falling further behind the private sector and living standards for federal employees and their families continue to decline,” the coalition claims in a letter to Congress. “A catch-up raise to reflect market rates in 2017 is imperative.”

Yes, that’s really what they said.

ARE HOUSE GOP LEADERS SUBVERTING THE IRS IMPEACHMENT EFFORT? There was a hearing of the House Judiciary Committee this week to consider whether to impeach IRS Commissioner John Koskinen. After all, Koskinen misled – out in the real world, that is pronounced “lied” – to Congress about Lois Lerner’s email.

Rep. Jim Jordan, the indefatigable Ohio Republican leading the impeachment effort, has determinedly made the case at every opportunity before colleagues and the American people via the media. Even so, it increasingly appears that House GOP leaders are balking at the idea of actually doing something consequential – rather than merely symbolic – on behalf of the constitutional integrity of Congress.

Take Thursday’s judicial panel hearing, for example. House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform Chairman Jason Chaffetz, a Utah Republican, said he favors censure of Koskinen, even as Judiciary panel chief Bob Goodlatte, a Virginia Republican, conspicuously refused to call the hearing by anything involving the word “impeach.”

Chaffetz told Katie Watson of the Daily Caller News Foundation’s Investigative Group, who covered the hearing, that he believes Goodlatte favors censure and that he views it as a step in the impeachment process. That apparently is supposed to satisfy Jordan and others who think the time to act is obviously now, not later.

“Right now, the rights of the legislative branch are being trampled on,” Jordan told TheDCNF. “And one of the best ways we can reassert that is by moving forward.”

WHY IS EPA REFUSING TO LET THE MEDIA INTERVIEW A SUPERFUND OFFICIAL? America’s most dangerous environmental pollution sites are being cleaned up by the Environmental Protection Agency’s Superfund program at a cost of $1 billion annually.

One might think that removing these threats to the public health is something the agency would be happy to discuss with the media. Well, apparently not if you are that part of the media known as “Ethan Barton of the Daily Caller News Foundation Investigative Group.” 

He’s been pressing for weeks for interviews with Superfund officials, seeking information about how the program goes about its business, what it costs, who it uses for contracts and all the other mundane questions reporters like to ask government officials. But EPA’s public affairs office appears to have put the Superfund off limits to journalists, according to Barton. What is EPA hiding?

WHO IS BEHIND THE ASTRO-TURFING OF THE WHITE HOUSE FACEBOOK PAGE? There were 3.6 million comments posted to the White House Facebook Page in the last five years by 515,000 commenters linked to specific profiles. No surprise there, right? You expect lots of people to post comments on that page.

But what happens when you drill down into those numbers, as did Tyson Analytics, a firm that specializes in data analysis, and Katie Watson of the Daily Caller News Foundation Investigative Group? Numbers often have a way of exposing things that would otherwise never be seen, like why there were so many pro-Obama comments.

A tiny group of profiles – a mere 0.048 percent of all the profiles – accounted for 24 percent of all the comments posted on the page. Narrow the time studied to the months leading up to President Obama’s re-election in 2012 and that percentage goes from 24 to 42 percent.

And surprise! “TheDCNF found many of the top profiles were linked to Facebook accounts with just the commenter’s name listed as a friend or only a small handful of names of purported friends,” according to Watson. Are you surprised that the most frequently commenting profile used “Nazis” and “Republicans” in the same sentence? Can you say “sock-puppet?”