No more kennedys in washington..

[Bernice Moore]

http://slatest.slate.com/id/2279249/

[Magda Hassan]

Mission accomplished for some.

[Charles Drago]

It gets sadder.

The "replacement" for Patrick Kennedy is the criminally incompetent -- and, arguably, competently criminal -- current mayor of Providence, Rhode Island: David Cicilline.

Over the past eight years, Cicilline has presided over the destruction of Providence's public schools -- among the lowest performing in the nation. He permitted his now dis-barred and ex-con brother to bounce a $75,000 tax check owed by one of his clients -- who, once the lien was lifted on the property in question, sold it and split. Adding insult to injury, Cicilline further charged Providence taxpayers hundereds of thousands of dollars to pay for a cover-up audit. And he fired the honorable City tax collector who had the audacity to do his job and pursue Cicilline's brother.

In his role as the city's public safety commissioner, Cicilline has allowed the violent crime rate in Providence to soar.

And Cicilline sat idly by as his city's unemployment rate topped off at 18% and more than three million square feet of prime downtown office space became vacant.

But wait, there's more.

David Cicilline's administration is the target of a sitting Grand Jury looking into the circumstances under which a seedy Providence strip club located near a middle school was awarded a liquor license. It seems that more than $100,000 in cash changed hands in Cicilline's City Hall.

Indictments are likely to reach as high as one of Cicilline's former chiefs of staff. And perhaps higher.

Exit the flawed but honorable, well-intentioned, and often marvelously effective Congressman Patrick Kennedy.

Enter the incompetent, lying, probably criminal David Cicilline -- who barely won a four-way Democratic Primary with less than a third of votes cast, and squeaked by a Neanderthal GOP opponent in the General.

The outgoing Democratic chair of the House Judiciary Committee was told by Party bigwigs that if David Cicilline is indicted before he takes his new office (unlikely, alas), he will not be seated. If he is indicted later next year, he will be asked -- pointedly -- to resign. If indictments stop at the chief of staff level, there may be criminal enterprise problems for Cicilline -- who, by the way, lives on his "credentials" as the first openly gay, half Jewish/half Italian, uber-liberal to serve in Congress.

And from a deep political perspective, certain of Cicilline's border-line past behaviors have been "documented." He is now subject to blackmail by some of the worst people on the planet.

David Cicilline is a monstrous manifestation of all that is wrong with the American political system.

[Peter Lemkin]

Sadly, I beg to differ, they are buried all over the city..................