[Hammock Parties]

The guy wrote a column about Kiffin being toast. Apparently the Raiders didn't like it.

Here's his response to the "confrontation."

Lane Kiffin isn't going anywhere until he hears the magic words — "your guaranteed money means nothing to me" — personally from Al Davis, and that appears to be a slow"... slow"... slow"... motion"... firing.

Al Davis isn't going anywhere, obviously, though we see and hear less and less of him every day. I miss you, A.D.!

Senior executive John Herrera definitely isn't going anywhere, because the truest-heart Raiders officials never go away, they just keep on battling.

And I'm not going anywhere, other than to New Orleans this weekend for the 49ers game. But I'll be back, I promise, Al and John.

So, for the time being, we're all stuck with each other, until the moment Davis pulls the trigger on the longest-rumored firing in the history of history.

That's fine and dandy — Herrera angrily confronted me right after Kiffin's news conference Monday, as Kiffin merrily strode by, but I'll take that sort of thing as long as it illustrates the larger issue.

Namely: the Raiders' burbling lunacy, which doesn't always manifest itself so vividly in public.

And I would guess the protracted proceedings are fine with Kiffin, who smartly will not accept a firing by proxy and most assuredly will not resign (and walk away from his remaining guaranteed money).

Maybe it happened in Monday's late hours. Maybe it will happen today. Maybe not for another few weeks.

Despite the executive-on-coach acrimony, Kiffin's 1-2 Raiders are playing solid football the past two weeks and the shocking revelation to Davis might be that he hates a guy who, gasp, can actually coach up his roster.

"Until I am told by Al Davis that I'm not the head coach here anymore, we're going to keep plugging away the same way we have been," Kiffin said at the news conference.

"I have not been told by Al Davis that I am not the head coach. Until he tells me directly, we'll keep plugging away. There are so many conversations around here that go on. To get into that, I'm not going to get into that right now."

That stance clearly did not refute the national reports that other officials have told Kiffin he would be fired.

Interestingly, Kiffin did the news conference wearing athletic garb, but not a stitch of Raider-logo clothing, which is the NFL fraternity's way of signaling that this coach no longer wants to be associated with the front office or ownership.

Also, Kiffin accepted the general point of my Herrera-enraging question — a question that referenced at least one attempt by at least one Raiders official to goose the argument in an anti-Kiffin direction.

Herrera didn't like that question and said my assumption that a senior executive printed out and distributed an article critical of Kiffin was a lie. It wasn't, by the way. Much frenzy accompanied our not-so-brilliant discussion.

All part of the Raiders landscape. Kiffin seemed to enjoy the festivities — at last, we saw behind the Raiders' curtain and that's what Kiffin sees every day.

Again, the Kiffin message: If Al wants to fire me, let Al and only Al fire me.

"There's no way I'm quitting, and that's got nothing to do with money at all," Kiffin said. "That has to do with our players. I talked a lot of these players into coming here at some point — obviously, money has a lot to do with that — in free agency over the last two years.

"A lot of our coaches, I recruited them and their families to come here and build this thing together. So the last thing I'm ever going to do is quit, the way that you guys are talking about quitting, or even quit behind closed doors."

No, this is all out in the open. It was there for the cameras and the tape recorders Monday.

Al, I'm with Lane on this one: If you're going to try to fire me, too, then you've also got to do that in person.

I like your senior executives. But we need to do this face to face.