Imprisoned American Pastor to Face “Hanging Judge” in Iran

From The New American by Dave Bohon, January 15, 2012

An Iranian-American pastor who has been imprisoned in Iran for the past several months is set to face a religious judge in Iran who has a record of sending people to the gallows. The Rev. Saeed Abedini, who grew up in Iran and was training to be a suicide bomber before becoming a Christian, resides in the United States with his American-born wife and their two children. As reported by The New American, Abedini was a leader of Iran’s underground church before leaving for the United States, and while he had worked out a deal with Iranian officials that allowed him to return to the country for humanitarian purposes, he was taken into custody in September 2012, and only in recent days was he indicted on as-yet unspecified charges.

Jay Sekulow, executive director of the American Center for Law and Justice (ACLJ), which has stepped forward to advocate for Abedini’s release, told the Jerusalem Post that the American citizen and minister has been transferred to Branch 26 of the Tehran Revolutionary Court, and is now in the hands of Judge Pir-Abassi, who is “notorious for his harsh sentences against those who exercise their fundamental freedoms.” Sekulow said that Pir-Abassi “is often referred to as one of Iran’s ‘hanging judges‘ for the numerous individuals he has sent to the gallows.”

In 2011 the European Union placed Pir-Abassi on a list of individuals subject to sanctions for human rights violations. In April of that year the Official Journal of the European Union noted that, following Iran’s 2009 elections, Pir-Abassi presided over several trials in which he handed down lengthy prison terms, as well as several death sentences, to individuals identified by the EU as Iranian human rights activists.

In its 2012 annual report, the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom also recommended that the U.S. government apply similar sanctions to Pir-Abassi and his family, noting that he is “responsible for particularly severe violations of religious freedom.” Sekulow said that while the State Department is well aware of Pir-Abassi’s human rights record, it has not acted on the recommendations, nor has it moved to help Pastor Abedini. “It is an absolute travesty that the U.S. government would stand by idly while an American citizen, detained for his exercise of a fundamental human right, deteriorates in an Iranian prison,” said Sekulow.

Sekulow called Abedini’s case “highly troubling,” noting that “it appears Iran is determined to remove any chance of the American pastor receiving any semblance of a fair trial. Even more troubling is that the U.S. government has remained silent, essentially abandoning this American in his search for justice.”

Abedini’s wife, Naghmeh, said that her husband’s passion is “to reach the people of Iran,” and his role in leadership of the underground church has made him a target of the country’s Muslim leadership. “They see the underground churches as a threat and they see Christianity as a tool from the West to undermine them,” she told Fox News. “They think if the country becomes more Christian, they are no longer under Islamic authority. That’s why it’s a threat.”

The ACLJ also released a letter by Pastor Abedini, written to his family and friends from his cell in Iran’s notorious Evin Prison. While the letter reveals some of the torture and abuse the American citizen is facing as he awaits the zealotry of Iran’s religious judiciary, it is also a profoundly moving testament to the power of faith in God.

“The Word of God says that when we are persecuted for our faith, we are to count it all joy,” writes Pastor Abedini. “When I think that all of these trials and persecutions are being recorded in heaven for me, my heart is filled with complete joy.”

Noting the scriptural admonition that the joy of the Lord is the foundation of a Christian’s strength (Nehemiah 8:10), Abedini advises that without Christ’s strength “we cannot live. It is this joy in our life that gives us strength to continue in this life. Without strength, we cannot continue the work of the Lord and without joy there is no strength.”

Abedini recalls that he always wanted God “to make me a godly man. I did not realize that in order to become a godly man we need to become like steel under pressure. It is a hard process of warm and cold to make steel.”

Describing his day-to-day existence, he relates that “one day I am told I will be freed and allowed to see my family and kids on Christmas (which was a lie) and the next day I am told I will hang for my faith in Jesus. One day there are intense pains after beatings in interrogations, the next day they are nice to you and offer you candy. These hot and cold days only make you a man of steel for moving forward in expanding His Kingdom.”

Abedini concludes by counseling that “what is in us [as Christians] is stronger than what is in the world and it has conquered the world.” He signs the letter, “Pastor Saeed Abedini, in chains for our Lord Jesus Christ.”

Among those commenting on the powerful letter was George O. Wood, general superintendent of the Assemblies of God denomination, who received a copy of the letter from Abedini’s wife.

“Saeed’s letter is nothing short of a modern-day Pauline epistle,” reflected Wood. “As I read his letter through several times, I could only marvel at how God’s faithfulness transcends time as the same Holy Spirit that was with Paul in his times of desperation is fully evident in the words of our brother Saeed.”

Wood said he was amazed by how the letter from the imprisoned pastor “inspires and ministers to me when he — it would seem — is the one who needs our prayers. I encourage believers to allow this letter to inspire them to greater things, to pass it on to friends and to continue to uplift Saeed, Naghmeh, and their two young children to God in prayer.”

Earlier this year Jay Sekulow and the ACLJ were instrumental in gaining the release of another imprisoned Iranian pastor, Youcef Nadarkhani, whom Iranian officials had threatened with execution for his efforts to convert Muslims to Christianity. Sekulow said that Abedini’s situation is dire because the Iranian government does not recognize his U.S. citizenship, which he received through his marriage to Naghmeh, who is American.”

“We continue to press the Obama Administration to engage this case — to speak out forcefully on Pastor Saeed’s behalf and put pressure on Iran’s allies to free this American,” said Sekulow. “Time is of the essence.”

IRS to Employers: There’s No Escaping ObamaCare

From The New American by Michael Tennant, January 14, 2012

The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) has fired a shot across the bow of employers hoping to remain free of ObamaCare’s employer mandate by adhering to the letter, but not the spirit, of the law. The agency’s message: Don’t even think about it.

The IRS recently issued a 144-page notice of “proposed regulations providing guidance under section 4980H of the Internal Revenue Code … with respect to the shared responsibility for employers regarding employee health coverage.” That is, the agency is notifying the public that it will be promulgating rules as to how it interprets the employer mandate and how it intends to enforce it.

And as Merrill Matthews observes at Forbes: “Don’t you love that ‘shared responsibility’ reference? It’s as if President Obama’s campaign speeches have morphed into IRS reg[ulation]s.”

The employer mandate requires employers with 50 or more full-time employees to offer “affordable” health insurance coverage to those employees, with “affordable” defined as costing an employee no more than 9.5 percent of his total household income. For every full-time employee who opts out of “unaffordable” employer-sponsored coverage and obtains insurance on a state exchange, often with a taxpayer subsidy, the employer will be fined up to $2,000.

“The Treasury Department and the IRS are aware of various structures being considered under which employers might use temporary staffing agencies (or other staffing agencies) purporting to be the common law employer to evade application of section 4980H,” the IRS notice states.

The IRS anticipates two ways in which employers might try to circumvent the mandate through temporary agencies. First, an employer might hire an employee directly for, say, 20 hours a week, then hire the same person through a temporary agency for another 20 hours per week, thereby getting 40 hours’ worth of work out of that individual without either the employer or the agency having to classify him as a full-time employee. Second, an employer might not hire the individual directly at all but might hire him through more than one temporary agency, again obtaining 40 hours’ worth of work a week but keeping the individual from being considered a full-time employee of either the employer or any of the temporary agencies.

“The Treasury Department and the IRS anticipate that only in rare circumstances, if ever, would the ‘client’ under these fact patterns not employ the individual under the standard as a full-time employee,” says the IRS. “Rather, the Treasury Department and the IRS believe that the primary purpose of using such an arrangement would be to avoid the application of section 4980H.”

Fortunately for Uncle Sam, the IRS is on top of the situation: “It is anticipated that the final regulations will contain an anti-abuse rule to address the situations described” above. Essentially, if an employer tries to skirt the law’s intent by using one or more temporary agencies to get a full-time employee without having to classify him as such, the IRS will simply declare that the individual is indeed a full-time employee and add him to the employer’s count of said employees.

In addition, notes CNSNews.com:

The agency specified that employers could still fall under the mandate if they employ enough part-time workers to equal 50 full-time workers. For example, if an employer has 40 full-time workers and 20 part-time workers, that employer would be considered by the government to have 50 full-time workers and would be subject to the mandate because the 20 part-time workers average to 10 full-time workers — meeting the 50 full-time-worker threshold.

“So Obama rams through a costly, onerous, time-consuming and job-killing health insurance bill, and employers will look for ways to limit or minimize its impact — just as rich liberals do with taxes,” Matthews remarks. “And the IRS expects it, which is why it’s putting employers on notice.”

In short, there is no escaping the long arm of what purports to be the law. Never mind that both ObamaCare and the IRS are affronts to liberty and that the former is plainly unconstitutional, no matter what the Supreme Court — which couldn’t even decide whether the $2,000-per-employee punishment is a tax or a penalty — may have declared.

Given that the notice of proposed regulations runs to a gross of pages — and gross they are — one can only imagine how immense the final rules will actually be. And that will be on top of regulations that, as of October, were already “well over twice as long as the Guinness World Record for the longest novel,” according to Americans for Limited Government.

Naturally, enforcing all these new rules will require more bureaucrats. The Treasury Department’s inspector general for tax administration says “the IRS will need more than 2,000 employees to monitor compliance with Obama’s health care law,” writes Matthews. “And that’s just for 2013.”

“Well, Nancy Pelosi claimed when ObamaCare passed that it would create 400,000 new jobs almost immediately,” he adds. “The public probably didn’t understand she was talking about IRS agents looking to make sure you accept your shared responsibility”.

Former Presidents Reap Millions in Taxpayer Dollars

From The New American by Brian Koenig, January 15, 2012

Capitalizing on a little-noticed component of the federal budget, a number of former U.S. presidents are enjoying the retirement benefit of millions of taxpayer dollars, including expenses for rent, postage, phone, and office staff, and even their satellite television bills.

“Bill Clinton is a multimillionaire, but you’re paying for the Cinemax in his office,” the Daily Caller reported, after filing a Freedom of Information Act request for thousands of pages of e-mails and documents chronicling how taxpayer dollars are spent on former presidents each year. “That’s just one eyebrow-raising expense a former occupant of the White House has been allowed to put on the taxpayer tab every year, even though every living ex-president is quite wealthy.”

In 2011, Clinton used his nearly $1-million post-presidency allowance for expenses such as rent, travel, personnel, and postage. He also used the money to install at least 10 televisions in his offices equipped with a top-tier suite of content from DirecTV. The $184 a month taxpayers dished out for his television entertainment desires provided Clinton with his DVR Service, 145 satellite channels, and 32 high-definition “Entertainment Unlimited” channels, including premium offerings such as HBO, Showtime, and Cinemax.

But, as the Daily Caller notes, Clinton is not the only former president living large off the $3.7 million doled out in taxpayer dollars in 2011. In that year, $1.3 million in government funding was dished out to former President George W. Bush, $835,000 to George H.W. Bush, and more than $500,000 to Jimmy Carter.

According to an ABC News article last May, in 2010, taxpayer-financed expenses included $15,000 for Jimmy Carter’s postage, $80,000 for George W. Bush’s phone bills, and a whopping $579,000 for Bill Clinton’s rent.

These allowances do not include the cost of Secret Service protection, which they are now guaranteed to enjoy for the rest of their lives, as allocated by new legislation signed last week by President Obama. In addition to satellite TV programming, Clinton and Carter’s offices both use taxpayer funding to subsidize subscriptions to the New York Times, running bills of $322.40 (for the digital version) and $415.58 (for the paper version), respectively.

Dan Cruz, deputy press secretary for the General Services Administration (GSA) — the agency that oversees the post-presidency allowances — assured the Daily Caller that all of these expenses are legally administered through the current law. “By law, the General Services Administration is responsible for providing former U.S. Presidents with office allowances,” Cruz wrote in an e-mail to the Daily Caller. “Each of these offices determines which services they need, and the General Services Administration pays allowable expenses and services under the law.”

The law that Cruz cites, the Former President’s Act, was passed in 1958 — largely inspired by Harry Truman’s poverty-stricken post-presidency — which provides ex-presidents and their widows with the allowances. Of course, no such post-presidency pay is authorized by the Constitution. As to the president’s pay, the Constitution says: “The President shall, at stated times, receive for his services compensation, which shall neither be increased nor diminished during the period for which he shall have been elected, and he shall not receive within that period any other emolument from the United States, or any of them.”

Considering the luxurious lifestyles of most former presidents, some lawmakers are striving to halt the payment of these extravagant expenses. Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah), for example, has sponsored a bill, called the Presidential Allowance Modernization Act, that would exclude a dollar of taxpayer funding for every dollar a former president earns over $400,000 a year. “Nobody wants our former presidents living the remainder of their lives destitute,” Chaffetz asserted in February, when unveiling the legislation. “But the fact is none of our former presidents are poor.”

“Presidents should get a compensation package. They should get a retirement, and they should get some expenses,” Chaffetz continued. “But if they’re going to go out on the trail, and they’re going to give speeches, write books and make money, then there comes a point where you say, okay, the taxpayer shouldn’t be responsible for also footing the bill for the office expenses, and the telephone paper, and the personnel, and those offices.”

Indeed, President George W. Bush has raked in more than $15 million for nearly 140 speeches — averaging about $110,000 per speech — since he left the White House in January 2009. Even more staggering, Clinton has earned a whopping $65 million in speaking fees, which included $7.5 million for 36 speeches in 2009 alone. And by 2011, thanks in part to the 14 books he has written, Carter was worth approximately $7 million.

 

U.S. Supreme Court Sinks Florida City Over Floating Home

By Jonathan Stempel | Reuters, January 15, 2012

When is a floating home not a vessel? The U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday told a Florida city its argument did not hold water, and that an abode on water was nothing but a home.

Reuters – Fane Lozman’s houseboat is seen Riviera Beach, Florida, in this undated handout photo taken from court documents.

In a 7-2 decision, the court ruled that a gray, two-story home that its owner said was permanently moored to a Riviera Beach, Florida, marina was not a vessel, depriving the city of power under U.S. maritime law to seize and destroy it.

Justice Stephen Breyer said nothing about former Chicago trader and Marine pilot Fane Lozman’s home that would have led a “reasonable observer” to conclude it could be used to transport people or things over water, but for the fact that it floated.

“Not every floating structure is a ‘vessel’,” Breyer wrote for the majority. “To state the obvious, a wooden washtub, a plastic dishpan, a swimming platform on pontoons, a large fishing net, a door taken off its hinges, or Pinocchio (when inside the whale) are not ‘vessels’.”

Riviera Beach, near Palm Beach, had seized Lozman’s home after he resisted a court order that he pay $3,040 in dockage fees, and destroyed it after being unable to sell it.

Tuesday’s decision reversed a lower-court ruling upholding the fees, and clears the way for Lozman to seek compensation.

Pamela Ryan, the city attorney for Riviera Beach, said in a statement she was disappointed with the ruling but accepts it, and that the city will revise its marina policies.

Lozman, 51, cheered the decision. “I feel like I’m floating on a cloud,” he said in a phone interview. “I have been fighting this city for 6-1/2 years and it is humbling to get a reversal.”

He said he now lives in North Bay Village, a suburb of Miami, and owns a financial software display company.

The definition of “vessel” is particularly important, given that admiralty law imposes different obligations on owners with respect to such things as staffing and taxation.

It is also a victory for the casino industry, which in court papers argued that more than 60 riverboat casinos should not be subject to U.S. maritime laws designed to protect seamen, on top of state laws to license and regulate the gaming business.

The decision limits special rules and remedies of maritime law to matters that “genuinely involve maritime commerce and transportation,” Jeffrey Fisher, a Stanford University law professor who represented Lozman, said in a phone interview. “That something floats and might be towed from Point A to Point B does not mean those rules and remedies should apply.”

COURT SEEKS CONSISTENCY

Lozman bought the 60-by-12 foot home in 2002. Four years later, he towed it to a Riviera Beach marina, where he kept it docked.

Although he was able to move the home in this manner, Lozman said it should not be covered by maritime law because it lacked the usual seafaring features such as a motor and GPS device, and needed land-based sewer lines and an extension cord for power.

The legal battle started after Lozman resisted new rules governing houseboats at his marina and opposed a proposed $2.4 billion luxury redevelopment of the marina.

In his opinion for the court, Breyer said the decision was consistent with the laws of California and Washington that also treat structures like Lozman’s as land-based homes.

“Consistency of interpretation of related state and federal laws is a virtue” because it makes the law easier to understand and follow, Breyer said.

Joining Breyer’s opinion were Chief Justice John Roberts, and Associate Justices Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Samuel Alito and Elena Kagan.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor, joined by Justice Anthony Kennedy, dissented, in the term’s first dissenting votes from a full court opinion. Sotomayor objected to the “reasonable observer” standard adopted by the majority.

The case is Lozman v. City of Riviera Beach, Florida, U.S. Supreme Court, No. 11-626.

(Editing by Howard Goller, Mohammad Zargham and Grant McCool)