Did you see? The North American International Auto Show is going on in COBO Center in Detroit? Yeah..

Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick, has been found exchanging text messages with a top office aide landing him into hot water [link]. Scandal makers are taking the text and claiming perjury concerning an illicit affair. An affair that he denied having in a whistle-blower trial that cost the city millions of dollars.

The trial pitted the Detroit cops against the City of Detroit in a “he was having an affair on the public dime” v. “what affair?” pissing match. This left cops (save for the chief of police and the mayor’s personal security detail who weren’t going to tattle) reeling over the untouchable/unconscionable actions of the mayor. On top of the allegations of spending tax dollars on an SUV for the wife and an ‘exotic dancer’ mysteriously found dead in an adjacent town after the mayor’s wife crashed a party in the mayor’s mansion; things aren’t looking too good for our fair city.

I don’t live or work in the city. I live two blocks away and work twenty miles away so my taxes aren’t funding these shenanigans. I write about this because this is a high visibility time for Detroit. Whoever decided to break this story did it after the world press left the auto show and the presidential primary but there is still enough buzz in the air that the scope of this story could travel past the city limits. Enough people discount this city already, we need the Associated Press to validate it?

I understand the city residents are unhappy… just ask the mayor’s wife, but given the country is in a month long economic downturn and our state’s flailing manufacturing sector we don’t need this scandalmongering. Great – our mayor is a dog, we need companies and people to come into Detroit, people need to go see the lovely DOMESTIC cars at the North AMERICAN International Auto show [link]. Move on people, there’s nothing to see here but the shiny new cars.