Has Michigan passed its tipping point?

The Detroit News reports:

there's far more weighing on southeast Michigan than the harrowing reckoning and threat of bankruptcy swamping the Detroit auto industry, its suppliers, their employees and their communities.


The Detroit mayoral scandal has metastasized into a City Council corruption probe that is overshadowing the rattling apart of the city's schools and redefining the word "embarrassment." Add the intensifying pressure on local governments and public schools and the question isn't whether we're at a tipping point; it's whether we're already past it.

Case in point: The president of Detroit City Council is quoted as telling WXYZ-Channel 7: "I do not believe that the majority of the council members that I work with on a daily basis are criminals." That's reassuring.

Another: Kenneth Cockrel Jr.'s chief of staff is allegedly videotaped taking bribes. The council's president pro tem -- Monica Conyers, wife of the House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers, D-Detroit -- is said to be under investigation by the FBI in connection with the probe.

Another: Detroit's public schools, the poster child for inept financial management, is preparing to cut its $1.1 billion budget by $408 million, through layoffs of teachers and non-instructional staff and a host of other measures that are long overdue. Until, that is, the school board changes its mind again.

You can count on Michigan losing at least one House seat after the next census.