DETROIT -- This was a week in which more good news came out of Michigan's largest city than Detroit has seen in a long time.
Ford Motor Co. sales actually beat the same period last year, fueled in part by the cash-for-clunkers program, which has been successful beyond anyone's wildest dreams.
After a shaky few days, Congress seemed all but certain to keep the clunker program going. Meanwhile, Vice President Joe Biden came to town to announce that Michigan would get $1.3 billion in new grants to help develop electric batteries and electric cars.
And last week's primary election returns also were highly encouraging. For years, the Detroit City Council has been largely an embarrassment to the city and the entire state, featuring clownish behavior, utter incompetence and a sea of corruption.
Voters sent a huge signal that enough was enough, shaking up council, beating one incumbent outright, rejecting another who is a convicted felon and putting two more at risk.
They overwhelmingly opted to give Mayor Dave Bing a full four-year term, and took two giant steps towards remaking their city's horrendous political charter and election process.
"I'm pretty ecstatic," said Gary Brown, a once high-ranking police officer who was fired when he attempted to investigate former Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick's behavior. That led to a lawsuit in which the mayor perjured himself. When incriminating text messages turned up, the mayor's days were numbered.
Brown then ran for council -- and finished a strong third, virtually guaranteeing a spot among the runoff winners in November. Under Detroit's bizarre election rules, voters on Tuesday chose nine names out of a list of 168 candidates.
The top 18 finishers go on to November, where the top nine are elected to four-year terms. Whatever happens, the next council is certain to have more new faces than any in a long time.
Two longtime incumbents, Barbara-Rose Collins and Sheila Cockrel, retired. Monica Conyers, who had served for several months as the most bizarre council president in city history, had to resign after pleading guilty to a bribery-related felony.
And Martha Reeves, the former Motown singer, didn't even make the runoff. More than 94 percent of the voters turned thumbs down to her. Nobody alleged she was corrupt -- but it was painfully clear that she had no idea what she was doing.
When she appeared to claim to be a member of the Detroit Lions football team, and said her old backup group the Vandellas were her running mate, it was too much for everyone.
Two other incumbents could conceivably lose the runoff. The four new faces that seemed certain to win are all educated and experienced. In somewhat of a surprise, the top vote-getter was former local TV anchor Charles Pugh.
The voters also elected a slate of generally respected leaders to revise the city's painfully flawed city charter. And other voters used their pens to help make another greatly needed change:
A grass-roots petition drive, Detroiters for Council by Districts, has evidently gathered enough signatures to place a proposal on the November ballot to establish a system with seven district and two at-large members after the next election in 2013.
The current system, in which all members are at-large, has been a disaster, in part because voters can't possibly sort out hundreds of candidates and tend to vote for familiar names.
It also has meant that almost all the council members tend to live in only a couple nice neighborhoods, have no specific responsibilities and find it easy to ignore individual complaints.
None of this means that Detroit's problems are over. The city faces tremendous economic hardship, grinding poverty and an eroding tax base. But if there is hope, it is in a government run by honest, rational and intelligent leaders.
Rational fears
Word that the government might move a few hundred Guantanamo detainees to a federal prison in Standish, in Michigan's thumb, has angered U.S. Rep. Pete Hoekstra, a Republican from the opposite side of the state.
"They are some of the most dangerous people on the planet," said Hoekstra, who is also running for governor next year.
Well, perhaps, but they would be housed in a federal maximum security prison. There has only been one known escape from a state maximum security lockup in modern times: A prison employee helped an inmate hide in a food truck in 2005. He was soon recaptured.
Kevin King, the mayor of Standish, has another fear: unemployment. The jobless rate in the county that includes Standish is now 20 percent, and will go higher if the federal prison closes, as it is now scheduled to do. Standish's mayor, not surprisingly, is more than willing to consider accepting Gitmo prisoners.
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