In Detroit, Not Exactly LOL LOL!

Let's go down to the Free Press.

In the past 15 years, the newspaper has been through a demoralizing strike and changes in ownership. The landmark Free Press building downtown is an empty shell. The paper now works in the same building as its rival, the Detroit News.

We sit down with Executive Editor Caesar Andrews to ask him about Kilpatrick's charges of felonious journalism. He politely notes that Kilpatrick has apparently gone out of his mind:

"It's just so insane. You don't expect comments like that from responsible community leaders."

Andrews declines to reveal the paper's source of the text messages because that source has asked to remain anonymous. But, he says, "nothing the Free Press did in the reporting of this story -- absolutely nothing -- was criminal or illegal or untoward in any way. Every step would meet the highest of standards."

He also notes that no point in any of the revelations -- down to the mayor's two-hour massage and hot tub in North Carolina -- has been challenged as incorrect.

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Many Detroiters are highly sensitive to their city's image -- they have a valid complaint that the town gets manhandled in the national news media -- and are just plain angry at the mayor for involving the city in such a tawdry affair. The largest union of municipal employees has called on him to resign.

"I'm just waiting for them to take him away in handcuffs," says Vicki Welch, a school counselor in the city, while shopping for groceries Sunday afternoon.

"The mayor is as wrong as two left shoes," chimes in a caller to a Monday morning radio show.

"He should go to jail for what he did," says Leanne Mitchell, enjoying a hot dog at the legendary Lafayette Coney Island downtown. "I couldn't care less who he's sleeping with. But it's the fact he lied on the stand. He's a liar and a cheat and he covered it up with city funds."

But business titans have so far been mostly silent.

"We're staying out of the fray," says Anne Masterson, spokeswoman for Detroit Renaissance, a nonprofit organization made up of regional corporate chiefs and various local professors, adding that the mayor is duly elected, has not been convicted of a felony and has no legal reason to resign.

"I don't think he did anything all these other politicians don't do -- Bush about Iraq, Clinton and that intern, that senator who got arrested in the bathroom and confessed and now wants to take it back," says Gennece Gantt, who says she has voted to both elect and reelect Kilpatrick. "If we're going to tell the truth, let's talk about all of them, not just about the mayor of Detroit."

"The mayor, like anyone else, deserves due process."

This is the Rev. Horace Sheffield III, the politically active pastor of the New Galilee Missionary Baptist Church. He's known Kilpatrick since they shared adjacent lockers at the downtown YMCA gym years ago. He says that many in the city are hoping to use the issue for political gain: "Five people have called me in the past two weeks to ask if I'll support them in the next mayoral election in 2009."

He notes both the progress the city has made under its dynamic young leader, and compares that to the bitter history of racial animosity that much of the surrounding region has harbored toward Detroit, a city that is 80 percent black, for decades. For those reasons, he notes that whatever Kilpatrick's sins, his fate is an internal matter that doesn't concern the rest of the area, much less the nation:

"Detroiters have a very strong sense that no matter what he's done -- legally, morally, ethically -- it's their decision to make as to what happens to him."