Today I had an interesting morning.

Minutes after getting out of bed, I was spending a few moments with my wife before we both went to work when we got a call. It was from the Central Parking garage across the street where we park our car. (We’re monthly parkers.) A manager, with a vaguely agitated voice, said, “We need you to fix your ticket because your ticket was left open when you picked up your car yesterday.”

I didn’t quite understand what that meant, but a reasonable request. Except for one problem: we didn’t pick up our car yesterday.

As my eyes began to bulge out, I raised this point. And then the conversation rapidly descended to a staccato exchange of ‘Where’s our car?’ ‘I will have to call you back.’ ‘Where’s our car?’ ‘I will have to call you back.”

As I learned in the call and soon after, someone had taken the car without providing the ticket you get when you drop it off. And, apparently (though the stories became more and more dubious) when they’d done an inventory this morning they realized our car was gone. Thus, the story about the ticket being ‘open’.

I threw on some clothes and hustled down to the garage and started asking what the hell was going on. There were three or four different contradictory stories. But they all boiled down to this: the attendant on duty, who was apparently new, had allowed someone to walk into the lot, late Monday night, and drive off with the car without getting the ticket or asking for ID or anything. Not that the car thief was sneaky about it. The attendant saw the guy, who said either that he was the owner of the car or had permission to take it. Or maybe he didn’t say that. The unidentified person had this description and then that description. Then it wasn’t clear whether there was any description at all. And thus it went, descending precipitously.

It all amounted to the same thing though: the mystery driver walked in to the small one level garage, didn’t show any ID, provide a ticket, or even pretend to be anyone he wasn’t and just drove off with the car, no questions asked.

Maybe he even gave the customary wave goodbye. Who knows?

So now I’m back with the manager. Or now I’m bumped up to the next level of manager.

“Are you sure there aren’t any relatives or friends who you gave permission to take out your car?”

“P-o-s-i-t-i-v-e…”

“Where’s our car?”

“It is quite unfortunate.”

And so it went and soon we were off to the 13th Precinct to fill out all the proper forms to officially have had your car stolen.

I have to say that, though this is perhaps the sort of thing you’re supposed to say, the part of the morning I spent with New York’s finest was the most pleasant part of the day. By the time I left the 13th, I was deep into the customer service phone tree at Central Parking trying to get some explanation for what had happened and some clarity on all the conflicting stories.

“The story we hearing doesn’t seem to add up. We’re talking to the attendent at 1 PM. We’ll contact you as soon as we know any more.”

After 1 PM the whole matter was ‘under investigation’ and they “couldn’t disclose” any details.

By two, they’d stopped responding to our calls altogether.

At this point, I wasn’t sure whether I was more pissed that our car had been stolen or that this big parking garage conglomerate was actually like a big corporate three year old pretending that the whole thing hadn’t even happened. So I went back down to the garage after leaving work early. When the whole drama started in the morning, I’d been told the mystery attendent had a 3 to 11 shift. This was the guy they were going to talk to to get a straight story. Then after they talked to him suddenly they wouldn’t return our calls.

If they didn’t like what he had to say, I figured he might not be there. And sure enough, nowhere to be found.

And where was he? “I cannot disclose this.”

Cue to Josh harping and insisting. “He’s been suspended. It’s quite unfortunate.”

The next flare up?

Over the last week, Turkey has lost 15 soldiers in cross border attacks from Kurdish separatists operating from inside Iraq. Pressure for retaliation is growing inside Turkey. But President Bush is asking for them to hold off on acting.

Art Brodsky gives us an update on Net Neutrality in the senate.

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Arlen Specter (R-PA): From fighter to apologist in 60 seconds. That and other news of the day in today’s Daily Muck.

The Jefferson legal saga continues.

I was just pulling together material for a column I’m writing this morning. And on second reading of Joe Klein’s Lieberman column this week in Time, this passage jumped out at me …

There are those who believe the Senator’s unwillingness to criticize Bush has its roots in politics. “He flew too close to the sun,” said a Connecticut Democrat who believes that Lieberman played nice with the President in the hope of securing both the Democratic and the Republican nominations for Senate this year.

Can this be true? I’m not sure if the idea here is that Lieberman actually gamed his criticism of President Bush for the meager advantage of not having any challenger this year as opposed to whatever shlub the state GOP planned to send up against him on an electoral suicide run or whether he just wanted the bipartisanship hat trick of dual nomination.

In any case, the thought strikes me as highly implausible. Joe’s kid gloves with the president and failure to take a stand on the disaster that has become of Iraq seems far more likely to be characterological or an effort to work Beltway opinion. But Klein seems to really think there might be something to this theory. Has anyone else heard anything about this?

How would you like to make a hundred-fold return on your investment — in just six years? One scandal-linked lobbying firm (tied to a powerful GOP congressman) made such dreams come true, Paul Kiel finds.

Question of the Day: Is Joe Lieberman going to be sworn for a fourth term in the senate next January? Tell us what you think here.

Okay, the New York Times EmpireZone blog followed up with New Jersey Senate candidate Tom Kean to ask for clarification of his Social Security bamboozle. And well, seems there’s still some hedging. You be the judge ….

We note, however, that there has been has been a terminological dispute in political circles over what, exactly, the word “privatization” means. Some Republican pols, when pressed, have said they support some version of private accounts but oppose “privatization.” To clear things up, we put in a call to Kean campaign spokeswoman Jill Hazelbaker, and asked her to unpack her candidate’s thinking for us. Does Mr. Kean, we asked, favor a change to Social Security that would allow individuals to carve out part of their existing payroll tax payments into individual investment accounts?

Mr. Hazelbaker’s prompt reply: “Kean studied the various plans that would privatize social security, decided that it was the wrong way to go, and does not support any measure that privatizes Social Security. So, the answer to your question is no.”

So, we continued, Mr. Kean opposes carve-out accounts by any name?

“No matter what you call it he opposes it,” she replied.

No matter what you call it, he opposes it?

But what is the it they’re calling? What does he oppose? I think the verbal wiggliness tells the story. He’s hiding behind the ‘privatization’ bamboozle. Thoughts?

And if he’s changed his position to being against phase out, will he commit to opposing it through his whole six year term of office? I think one of the pro-Social Security groups has a pledge they’d be happy to allow him to sign to go on the record.

Congress drags feet on Cunningham investigation.

And that’s a lot of feet!