At the playground this morning with my kids I ran into a TPM Reader who raised an interesting point: Even if Christine O’Donnell doesn’t win on November 2nd, will she at least score a personal best?

Remember, this is the third consecutive cycle in which O’Donnell has run for Senate. In 2006, she lost in the Republican primary but then ran as a write-in, garnering 4% against Tom Carper. Then she ran again in 2008 getting 35.3% of the vote against Joe Biden, who of course was also running for Vice President.

So 35% is the mark she needs to beat.

Notwithstanding all the trials of her campaign, it’s difficult to imagine that in this election year O’Donnell can’t exceed her personal best against a relative unknown like Chris Coons (who’s actually not that unknown in the state). Going back to July she’s only twice polled below 35% against Coons, though one of those two was just a few days ago. And she’s polled over 40% three times — though each of those was a Rasmussen poll and the highest was 42%. (See all the polls here.) So the polling trend shows it’s possible she could actually underperform her 2008 personal best, though it seems unlikely.

Our Evan McMorris-Santoro is covering the Kentucky Senate debate tonight. And it apparently got really nasty really fast, in large part in reaction to Conway’s Aqua-Buddha fusillade over the weekend. We’ll have a report shortly.

Because it’s 2010 and it had to happen, two candidates in one of the top Senate races in the country squared off tonight in an angry, knock-down drag out debate over a “false idol called Aqua Buddha.”

Evan has our just-filed report on tonight’s Kentucky Senate debate.

At a Joe Miller for Senate campaign event today in Alaska, members of Miller’s private security team ‘arrested‘ journalist Tony Hopfinger of the Alaska Dispatch. Hopfinger later told local TV news station KTUU that he was asking questions when he was told by Miller’s security detail that he was under arrest and placed in handcuffs. The security guards kept Hopfinger in custody pending the arrival of Anchorage police. But when police arrived they released Hopfinger and said no charges would be filed.

William Fulton, one of Miller’s security guards, released a statement claiming that Hopfinger became belligerent and menacing to the candidate while asking about the scandal surrounding Miller’s work as city attorney for Fairbanks North Star Borough in 2007 and 2008. The security guards were apparently part of a team provided by “Drop Zone”, the Anchorage-based private security firm hired by the campaign.

Miller said last week that he would no longer answer press questions about his personal or professional background.

You’d think by now Facebook would have sorted out how to prevent outside applications from accessing information they’re not supposed to be able to access. Apparently not. To be clear, there’s two categories of privacy issues involving Facebook: there’s the stuff Facebook is open about sharing, which a lot of users find too intrusive but which at least you can decide whether to go along with (for what it’s worth, I tend to go along), then there’s the breaches of security which Facebook didn’t intend or design to prevent. This latest episode seems to fall in the second category.

The new Michele Bachmann comic book, issue #4, has arrived. And in this edition, Michele talks to God. Our Eric Kleefeld has his review.

OK, he doesn’t literally dance but Carl Paladino has been doing a mean soft-shoe shuffle trying to distance himself from his own anti-gay remarks two Sundays ago. We’ve put together a timeline of Paladino’s shuffling.

In case you missed it this weekend, how Jack Conway shook up the Kentucky Senate race and rattled Rand Paul.

I’m hearing a lot of whining today on my Teevee from Democrats about Jack Conway’s ad hitting Rand Paul. Appalling, wrong, brought it on himself. Oh please.

I’m sure we can all agree that it would have been better for Jack Conway to go ahead and lose his race in dignity and fairmindedness than resort to this accursed awfulness, matching Rand in the dignity of the campaign he’s run. Voters resonate with candidates who don’t attack their opponents and ignore attacks on themselves because their unwillingness to defend themselves signals steelymindedness and strength.

Can a candidate’s private security team ‘arrest’ a journalist and detain him with handcuffs for asking questions he’s told not to ask? I wouldn’t have thought so. But that’s what happened yesterday in Alaska with Senate hopeful Joe Miller and Tony Hopfinger, the founder and editor of the Alaska Dispatch.

See the video.