THERE WERE U.S. MILITARY FORCES AVAILABLE TO RESPOND TO BENGHAZI TERRORIST ATTACKS: Judicial Watch obtained an email from then-Department of Defense Chief of Staff to Hillary Clinton’s top aides during the attack telling them American forces were “spinning up” and available at that very moment. Brooklyn, you have a problem.

OBAMA’S HHS GAVE A SWEETHEART DEAL to a medical analytics firm owned by a company that had to settle a health data fraud case brought against it by the New York Attorney General for $400 million. Can you guess what the sole-source, five-year, open-ended “Blanket Purchase Agreement” is buying for the Obamacare program from the lucky firm? If you said health data –  including an undetermined amount from the database used in the New York fraud – you get the gold ribbon.

Oh, and did I mention that Andy Slavitt, Obama’s nominee as Administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid (which runs Obamacare), is a former top executive with firm at the heart of the fraud? Maybe that’s why he got an unusual ethics waiver from the Obama administration that allows him to participate in decisions affecting his former employer? Just saying ….

And one more thing: Not only does the contract’s renewal not have to be made public, according to federal procurement regulations, nobody knows how much the deal is worth because there’s no dollar amount affixed to it. Okay, that was two things.

WILL CONGRESS IGNORE THE WORST BUREAUCRATIC OUTRAGE YOU’VE NEVER HEARD ABOUT UNTIL NOW? Well, yes, with 305 co-sponsors for the Email Privacy Act in the House of Representatives, odds are good the answer is yes. The bill protects ISPs from judge-less subpoenas but not private citizens. They are called “administrative subpoenas” and they are bad news for those who appreciate the Fourth and Fifth Amendments.

HUD IS A $50 BILLION FEDERAL DEPARTMENT AND IT’S BOOKS ARE WORTHLESS? The Daily Caller News Foundation Investigative Group’s Ethan Barton reports that’s essentially the conclusion of the department’s inspector general in an audit report that details nine “material weaknesses,” and “eight significant deficiencies in internal controls and six instances of noncompliance with applicable laws and regulations.” This is what happens when congressional oversight becomes an after-thought in the age of the imperial presidency. The IGs are essential points of the legislative branch’s oversight spears, but Congress has to do the shoving to make sure targets are hit and things get fixed.

EPA NEW-HIRE HITS BONUS JACKPOT: An unnamed EPA finance executive allegedly did such a fantastic job that she got two performance bonuses totaling $9,000 even though she’d been on the job for less than three months. The acting director of her office didn’t even know about the second bonus. The EPA’s inspector general said there are no rules that bar such quick bonuses but he could find no prior examples to match this one.

NO, WE AREN’T A “CHRISTIAN NATION,” BUT DEMOGRAPHICS SAY WE ARE A NATION OF (MOSTLY) CHRISTIANS: San Francisco is the country’s least faithful city but America’s most Baptist and Catholic cities aren’t where you may think they are.

NO, THE PILGRIMS WERE DEFINITELY NOT LIKE SYRIAN REFUGEES: The Daily Caller’s Scott Greer slices and dices the Left’s fallacious comparison like a succulent piece of Thanksgiving turkey. Here’s just a taste: “If it wasn’t for the Syrian refugee debate, sites like HuffPo, Salon and others would be running their usual ‘Happy Genocide Day’ coverage and dumping vitriol on the poor settlers who forged this nation.”

LIBERAL STUDENTS, FACULTY MOST LIKELY TO SILENCE SPEAKERS: A Daily Caller News Foundation analysis of Foundation for Individual Rights in Education of efforts to dis-invite speakers on U.S. college campuses between 2000 and 2014 comes up with a surprise. One hundred and sixty student and faculty groups from the Left sought to silence somebody. That’s not a surprise. What is unexpected is the fact 96 such groups from the Right did the same thing. Whoa!

“Conservative students and faculty were most likely to protest invited speakers with criminal histories and those with contrary views on abortion and Israeli-Palestinian confrontation, while liberals were most likely to protest speakers’ views on sexual orientation, immigration and Islam,” the DCNF’s Kathryn Watson reported.

Previously, Watson reported that among the Ivy League schools, only the University of Pennsylvania gets a green rating from FIRE. Yale and Dartmouth got yellow, while Harvard, Princeton, Brown, Columbia and Cornell just stomped all over the First Amendment.

THIS MAY EXPLAIN MORE THAN WE REALIZE: Huma Abedin told State Department colleague that Hillary Clinton was “often confused.”

HOW EPA TRIED TO HIDE ITS YELLOW RIVER: You won’t believe what the bureaucrats did to keep the Gold King Mine spill out of the public eye. Or maybe you will, actually.

BUREAUCRATS FIND A ‘SUPERHIGHWAY’ AROUND FOURTH, FIFTH AMENDMENTS: So much for concepts like probable cause and no self-incrimination. You’ve probably never heard of “administrative subpoenas” but you will, sooner or later. And it won’t be fun.

FINANCIAL FRAUD IN OBAMACARE CO-OP? New York insurance regulators speed up “winding down” of Health Republic, the largest of the Obamacare co-ops, after finding its financial condition “substantially worse” than previously reported. Ten of the 23 Obamacare co-ops established at a cost of $2.4 billion in 2011, have shut down in recent weeks. And more failures are coming even if the feds are being secretive about it.

A WARNING TO BIBLE BULLIES EVERYWHERE: Threatening seventh graders for expressing their faith in class is probably not a winning strategy. And aren’t Christians supposed to have “a ready defense” of their faith?

LYING POLITICIANS AND THE JOURNALISTS WHO ENABLE THEM: That which is A cannot be Non-A. But don’t tell that to the MSM.

YOU PROBABLY THINK HIPAA PROTECTS YOUR MEDICAL PRIVACY: Not if federal bureaucrats want your records. All they have to do is issue an administrative subpoena. The Daily Caller News Foundation’s Kathyrn Watson says forget the Fourth Amendment because Congress decided administrative subpoenas don’t need prior approval by a judge

DID AP RIP-OFF THE DAILY CALLER NEWS FOUNDATION? AP “exclusive” today reports that “in each year from 2011 to 2014, the State Department’s poor cybersecurity was identified by the inspector general as a ‘significant deficiency’ that put the department’s information at risk. ” Great story, except for the fact the Daily Caller News Foundation’s Richard Pollock reported it first, on Sept. 27: “Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server to conduct official diplomatic business created many national security problems, but they may pale by comparison with the wreckage she left behind in her department’s main digital information security office.”

CO-OP FLOP: Here’s 12 things that help explain the biggest Obamacare disaster you’ve probably never heard about. So why can’t journalists at places like the New York Times and the Washington Post be as thorough and committed to getting the whole story as Richard Pollock of the Daily Caller News Foundation?

ARE FEDERAL BUREAUCRATS REALLY WORTH 78 PERCENT MORE THAN JOE BLOW WORKERS? Latest data from the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis says total compensation of 2.1 million federal civil servants is $119K vs $67K for taxpayers employed by private companies. What’s wrong with this picture?

TRUMP CAN’T WIN? THINK AGAIN: HERE’S HOW TRUMP WINS THE GOP NOMINATION: Donald Devine was one of the political strategists who helped Ronald Reagan win in 1980, so he knows something about presidential politics. Love Trump or hate him, Devine’s analysis of the Trump surge is absolutely essential reading.

HILLARY’S IT FIRM WASN’T CLEARED BY DOD TO HANDLE CLASSIFIED MATERIALS. So why would the nation’s chief diplomat use an obscure firm in Denver that wasn’t certified by the Pentagon as being capable of protecting national security secrets? This story keeps getting more amazing by the minute. Richard Pollock of the Daily Caller News Foundation’s Investigative Group has the story.

MORE LIBERAL INTOLERANCE OR JUST PLAIN HYPOCRISY? Hans Wyss, the Swiss billionaire and funder of Clinton Foundation’s No Ceilings project to empower women,  doesn’t want one woman – Jackie Long – empowered. He’s asked a Pennsylvania court to put her in jail because she told the Daily Caller News Foundation about allegations of how he sexually abused her. And Wyss threatened the DCNF with litigation after it published those allegations.

IF YOU LOVE DATA AND WORDS, the following job description may be of interest and perhaps we should talk. Contact .

DATA EDITOR JOB DESCRIPTION:
Must be able to do both summary statistics and deep-dive analyses using Excel, Access or other software programs to analyze large official databases such as FEC contributions, FBI Uniform Crime Reports data and CMS Excluded Doctors in search of news at the Daily Caller News Foundation. Should also be able to scrape/clean/reformat documents and datasets, and be comfortable graphically communicating data-driven stories using D3 or Tableau. Knowledge of national politics and recent history required. BIG plus for candidates with web programming capabilities. Salary commensurate with experience.

SOME WISDOM OF THE CROWD NEEDED: Earlier this week, the Daily Caller published this story about a major liberal donor who contributed $5 million to the Clinton Foundation’s No Ceilings women’s empowerment program even as his lawyers were in federal court trying to suppress records related to his long history of sexually abusing women.

Similarly, last July, the Washington Examiner published this story about the same major liberal donor’s former medical devices company killing three people in illegal human testing (we subsequently learned five people died). The story also noted then-Obama senior aide John Podesta’s financial links to the major liberal donor.

Neither story got traction in the national media. Now, I’ve been a journalist a long time and I know these are not nothing-burgers. I’m also pretty sure the results would have been dramatically different had the subject’s last name been spelled K-O-C-H instead of W-Y-S-S. What am I missing here???

IT’S BEEN A GREAT WEEK, FRIENDS AND FELLOW INSTAPUNDIT ADDICTS, but, sadly, it must end. Keep an eye on the exploding scandal at the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs. It’s exploding largely because of the reporting of the Washington Examiner’s Mark Flatten. His dogged insistence on facts and verification marks him as a great journalist. Check out a selection of his fine VA reporting here, here, here, here and here. And he’s got a huge VA story coming tomorrow or Tuesday.