UPDATE — It took 48 hours of bad press, but finally John Kerry told the AP Tuesday afternoon that he will pay boat taxes as if the vessel were moored in Massachusetts. END UPDATE

Liberal Massachusetts Democrat Sen. John Kerry — whose mega-rich wife is an heir to the Heinz food fortune — recently took possession of a new yacht that he had built in New Zealand. The 76 foot vessel, named Isabel, is moored in Rhode Island, where her designer lives and works.

But Kerry neither works nor lives in Rhode Island. He lives in a very expensive townhouse in Boston's exclusive Beacon Hill, vacations on the equally posh Nantucket Island, and works in the District of Columbia.

So why would Sen. Kerry have the boat domiciled in Rhode Island? Taxes.

Rhode Island has no sales tax on purchases such as a yacht and no excise tax that must be paid yearly.

According to media reports the, sales tax at a bit over 6%, would total over $450,000 if the boat were moored in Massachusetts instead of contiguous Rhode Island.

And the Bay State's first year's excise tax on the boat would be about $70,000.

Those amount to a tidy little saving in excess of half a million dollars that Sen.Kerry side-stepped just by keeping his pricey purchase over the line in The Ocean State.

But, the next time he moors Isabel at a Nantucket berth, the tax collector just might show up with his hand out, palm up. At least we can hope.

A couple of broadcast reports the Kerry Yacht Fiasco and interesting. One is WBZ-TV, Boston, and the other isFox News'

60% of US voters want Obamacare repealed — “the second straight week that support for repeal of Obamacare is at 60% or above,” according to the Rasmussen Report.
And...
36% Oppose repeal.
45% Strongly Favor repeal.
27% Strongly Oppose repeal.

Plus…
62% believe Obamacare will increase the federal budget deficit.
58% think it will raise the cost of healthcare.
51% say the new law will hurt the quality of healthcare.
(Rasmussen 5-31-10)

Gallup Daily tracking finds that 20.3% of the U.S. workforce was underemployed in March — a slight uptick from the relatively flat January and February numbers.

A rise in the percentage of part-timers wanting to work full time (from 9.2% to 9.9%) is responsible for the March increase in underemployment.

Unemployment saw a slight, but insignificant, decline in March.

Six in 10 underemployed Americans are not hopeful they will find work or move from part-time to full-time work in the next four weeks. That translates to 12% of the workforce that is both underemployed and not hopeful they will find their desired amount of work.

The lack of change suggests that underemployed Americans anticipated long-term difficulties in finding work well before the administration's formal announcement was made.

The Gallup report was released April 1, 2010.

"Americans are now about evenly split in their reactions to the healthcare bill's passage: 47% consider it a good thing and 50% a bad thing. The divided, but slightly negative, assessment is similar to what Gallup found in recent months prior to the final House vote," the polling company reported today, Monday 3-29-10.

A week after the House passed ObamaCare, 54% of voters favor the law’s repeal, including 44% who Strongly Favor repeal, according to the latest Rasmussen survey.

The poll also shows that 42% oppose repeal, including 34% who Strongly Oppose repeal.

Rasmussen said these number are “virtually unchanged” from last week’s poll results.

84% of Republicans favor repeal.
59% of Independents favor repeal.
25% of Democrats favor repeal.
1% of black Democrats favor repeal.
55% say the plan will increase healthcare costs.
17% say it will reduce healthcare costs.
49% say it will reduce care quality.
60% say it will increase the federal deficit.

The Rasmussen president Scott Rasmussen said: "The overriding tone of the data is that passage of the legislation has not changed anything. Those who opposed the bill before it passed now want to repeal it. Those who supported the legislation oppose repealing it."

In voting for Scott Brown to fill the US Senate seat left vacant by the death of Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, the Massachusetts voters demonstrated:
1. Dissatisfaction with the direction of the country,
2. Antipathy toward federal government activism, and
3. Opposition to the Democrats' health-care proposals.

Those are the conclusions (1-22-10) drawn from a Jan. 20-21 poll sponsored by The Washington Post, the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation and Harvard University's School of Public Health, and released by The Post, which says the statistics show “how dramatically the political landscape has shifted during President Obama's first year in office.”

63% of Massachusetts’ special-election voters said America “is seriously off track,” the newspaper reported. “Nearly two-thirds of Brown's voters say their vote was intended at least in part to express opposition to the Democratic agenda in Washington.”

Among all Massachusetts voters — including those who voted for Brown’s opponent, state attorney general Martha Coakley — 48 percent oppose said they oppose Obama’s healthcare proposals while 43 percent support them.
Among Brown's supporters, however, eight in 10 said they were opposed to Obama’s healthcare proposals, and, 66 percent of them strongly opposed them.

In 1863, President Abraham Lincoln declared and prayed at Gettysburg Pennsylvania that "...government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth."

But a little over 200 years later, 219 self-important Democrats in the House of Representatives voted FOR Obamacare; this despite the fact that the majority of Americans had repeatedly told them that they did not approve of the proposed legislation.

Before the House vote was taken, 56% of American voters said they opposed Obama's plan while 40% approved of it. And for six months before the House vote, all major national polls demonstrated close, but consistently negative, public attitudes of both Obamacare and Obama himself, to say nothing about House Speaker Pelosi and Senate Leader Reid.