Edward M. Kennedy Non-Presidential Consolation Institute
It’s sort of a non-Presidential Library for a guy who was never quite president. It’ll be next to his brother’s presidential library in Dorchester. Teddy didn’t get one of those, but he’s hung in for nearly 50 years, through events that would have croaked a lesser man’s career, and incidentally he’s a Kennedy, so he’ll get the Edward M. Kennedy Institute for the Senate. Don’t worry. You aren’t on the hook for all $100 million. Just $5.8 million for design and planning so far. Apparently, the health care industry has coughed up something like $20 million. AP, Feds Spend Millions on Kennedy Legacy in Massachusetts. It’s liberal lionizing:
BOSTON — More than one out of every five dollars of the $126 million Massachusetts is receiving in earmarks from a $410 billion federal spending package is going to help preserve the legacy of the Kennedys.
The bill includes $5.8 million for the planning and design of a building to house a new Edward M. Kennedy Institute for the Senate. The funding may also help support an endowment for the institute.
The bill also includes $22 million to expand facilities at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library & Museum and $5 million more for a new gateway to the Boston Harbor Islands on the Rose Kennedy Greenway, a park system in downtown Boston named after Kennedy’s mother and built on land opened up by the Big Dig highway project.
A spokeswoman for Sen. Kennedy, who at 77 is battling brain cancer, said he hadn’t requested the money for the library and institute, and that there are dozens of other earmarks in the spending bill for homeless services and community health centers.
The $22 million JFK library earmark was sponsored by fellow Massachusetts Democrat Sen. John Kerry, who is also a top sponsor for the money for the Kennedy Senate Institute. Kerry defended the library project, which he said is needed to upgrade the facility.
Nice to see him doing … something. Polite of AP to allow Kennedy the fiction that this is a Kerry thing.
“This National Archives project will eliminate the worst archival storage space problem in the presidential library system and it will facilitate six years of work to expand the library,” Kerry said in a statement. “This shovel-ready project will also bring much-needed jobs to the area.”
$22 million to alleviate cramped storage for old papers? Mine are in plastic boxes in the attic. Yeah, it’s cluttered up there. Couldn’t fix a bridge or something? There’s a legacy project.
A proposal to build a national institute on the U.S. Senate and to name it after Kennedy has been under discussion since 2003, but accelerated after Kennedy was diagnosed with cancer.
Local officials last year announced they were seeking up to $100 million to build the institute, which they said would focus on the Senate in general and Kennedy’s more than four decades of service to the body. The facility will be located in Boston on a four-acre plot near the JFK library.
About $20 million has already been raised for the institute, including contributions from drug companies, insurance companies and hospitals. Tentative plans called for a replica of the Senate chamber itself, as well as programs to train new senators.
I wonder why drug companies, insurance companies and hospitals are so eager to honor Ted Kennedy. AP seems incurious. Anyway, it sounds like a great center, for training senators, something I don’t think we’ve ever had over the last 200-some-odd years. What a great country, to be able to throw money at an ennobling project like that in the middle of the biggest economic downturn since the Great Depression.
“These funds will create jobs that are desperately needed, and will provide lasting benefits for all our citizens long into the future,” Kennedy said in statement accompanying a list of earmarks.
So would wiring the entire state for wifi. So would providing tax breaks for home improvement projects, so all the local carpenters, plumbers, electricians and home improvement stores would have work, as opposed to the hack bailout bill they pushed through, ensuring the survival of government jobs. Anyway, this way at least we’ll get a big white Kennedy dome, right next to the big white JFK sail-looking thing on Dorchester Bay. Also Kennedy legacy hack jobs … I’m guessing into the high dozens, maybe low hundreds, from janitors and elevator attendants, to librarians and curators and of course an executive director.
Anyone know if other senators who’ve been around for fifty years are getting one of these, or just Kennedys? Yeah, I figured Byrd would.
Doug Powers with other Kennedy legacy suggestions. Hurtfulness alert!
Malkin: Hyannispork.
Posted by Jules Crittenden at 10:20 pm on Wednesday, March 11, 2009
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