hhs.gov resolvers broken, or BIND misconfigured?

[Daisuke HIGASHI]

Hi James,

ISC might not handle BIND 9.8's issue because it has been
End of Life. You should ask Redhat for help or try latest BIND9.

But that sounds like same issue described in http://pastebin.com/j84451Nz .
Possible workaround is to run named in IPv4-only mode (e.g. named -4).

Several people in (Japanese) local community pointed out this issue and
reported it to ISC two years ago. I don't know whether the issue
has been fixed in latest BIND9...

Regards,
-- 
 Daisuke HIGASHI