This is the last week of employment. I may cut out early, but I am debating. I sent a nice little diatribe this morning to headquarters. Here is what I said:

"First off, I would like to say that anyone who has worked with me over the past year and a half will vouch for the fact that I am not known as someone who likes to stir things. However, this whole episode has awakened something in me that I feel needs to be put in writing.

After much deliberation and consultation with many folks internally and externally, I have decided that I am not going to sign the attached "authorization for recoupment" form, as I find it offensive that you should try and strong arm me into doing so. I feel like I am being treated poorly for a mistake that was essentially yours. You are making me feel like I am stealing something from you when the reality of the situation is that the money and time I "owe" you is due to no fault of my own. I respectfully submit that you write off the amount equal to the eleven days.

If you take a good look at the inefficiencies in other departments that you oversee, I'll bet you could find errors that are more egregious than this one. And if you look at my work record compared to some of my peers, you will find that the additional expense was worth it, to have someone who is competent, reliable and efficient on your staff for the price you've been paying. So the choice is yours, be punitive to send some kind of message, which will undoubtedly circulate among the others on the staff here at xxxxxxxxx and affect morale, or do the right thing by acknowledging your mistake and write it off like you would any other accounting error. I look forward to your reply."

I am not holding my breath. In fact, I am waiting for inadequate response now to give me enough cause to log off and take off, not looking back. I have had it with this situation. Couple this with the petition against the 56% rent increase that my wife and I face, I'm about at my wit's end. But I am about to go on tour, leaving a week from today. I'm hoping the hearing for the apartment doesn't take place while I'm gone, for my wife's sake. But I don't have any control over that.

I'm reading that Franken book right now. It's interesting how he pointed out Clarke before Clarke himself announced his frustrations with the Bush administration. I'm thinking Kerry can win this so long as he doesn't fuck it up.

Do you get the funny feeling that you're being watched?

Well, Frist fucked up, because Clarke called his bluff quite nicely. The smear campaign is going very, very badly. It is a beautiful thing to watch Chimp and Co. squirm.

Well, maybe the Clarke thing will have legs. I particularly like this passage in a Salon Interview with him:

Q: Why do you think Cheney -- and the Bush administration in general -- ignored the warnings that were put to them by [former national security advisor] Sandy Berger, by you, by George Tenet, who is apparently somebody they hold in great esteem?

A; They had a preconceived set of national security priorities: Star Wars, Iraq, Russia. And they were not going to change those preconceived notions based on people from the Clinton administration telling them that was the wrong set of priorities. They also looked at the statistics and saw that during eight years of the Clinton administration, al-Qaida killed fewer than 50 Americans. And that's relatively few, compared to the 300 dead during the Reagan administration at the hands of terrorists in Beirut -- and by the way, there was no military retaliation for that from Reagan. It was relatively few compared to the 259 dead on Pan Am 103 in the first Bush administration, and there was no military retaliation for that. So looking at the low number of American fatalities at the hands of al-Qaida, they might have thought that it wasn't a big threat.

They had a preconceived set of national security priorities. I would add, as Gore has already touched on since last year, that they have a preconceived set of ideological priorities across the board, whether it be domestic issues, the economy, national security, the lot. The Democratic party cannot be so neatly pigeonholed because it is a party that looks at the facts and draws conclusions, not the other way around.

I dunno about this Clarke thing. Partisans are not going to change their mind about any of this. The swing voters are where it's at. And I fear that too much emphasis on this is going to create a backlash, one where people are turned off by Kerry by associating him with the "shoulda, coulda woulda" crowd with the fine tuned hindsight vision they now have. The only way this can have an effect is as a contribution to many other stories that paint the correct impression that this administration is full of "lying, crooked" people. In that regard, Clarke has done us a great service, as Paul O'Neill, David Kay, and Rand Beers have already done before him. More will need to come, though. By November, the Clarke thing taken alone will be much ado about nothing at best. Kerry needs to get back on the stump and change the subject back to the economy, and hammer the point home that most of the "tax cuts" went to the rich, who are keeping the proceeds to themselves and are outsourcing the jobs, over, and over, and over, and over again. Kudos to Lou Dobbs for hammering the latter point.

Thought of another work related analogy today. The band I'm in is the last remaining lifeboat in my jump off this sinking ship.

I can't believe I missed this speech by Gore. It's another in his series touching on an administration that digs for dubious facts to support half baked theories, and using fear as a technique to keep people from examining the facts.

Nice letter today from my soon to be former place of employment:

"I acknkowledge that xxxxxxx has overpaid me wages of $xxxx.xx (net) by mistakenly continuing my full pay while I was on unpaid leave from October 15, 2003 through October 31, 2003. I have voluntarily resigned, April 9, 2004, and therefore authorize the Company to recoup the amount of overpaid wages, and I authorize the Company to withhold any such amount from my paychecks, up to and including my final paycheck."

Sorry, kids, I ain't signing that one until you spell out how you plan on withholding...

Fuckers.