Quick Hits

Odds & sods on a busy day before the busiest of busy days:

• CA-11: Pombo in the fight of his career, the LA Times says (finally). They're darn tootin'. Jerry McNerney is emblematic of a true netroots candidate, and he's close to getting it done. Repsected prognosticators like Larry Sabato and Chuck Todd of the Hotline are predicting a Pombo victory. This would be so richly deserved to the committed core of activists who've worked this race for over a year, and this would be such a great victory for our environment and our energy future. My fingers are crossed on this one.

• CA-GOV: Here's how the next four years are likely to go: you can't talk to the Governor, even if a public meeting place, unless his goons say so.

The governor, after giving a brief talk to the general media, disappeared behind a closed door with Editor Glenn Franco Simmons of The Eureka Reporter, a newspaper owned by one of Schwarzenegger's largest financial contributors, Rob Arkley.

Bill Maile, deputy press secretary for the Office of the Governor, said that financial contributions do not figure into how they grant interviews. And Brian Morrissey, spokesman for Security National, said neither he nor Rob Arkley knew of the visit until the last minute, after the governor had arrived in Eureka.

But a reporter from the Times-Standard was turned away at the door, despite requesting to sit in on an interview that was taking place on public school property.

• VA-SEN: Speaking of goons, when George Allen's team isn't making threatening phone calls to voters, they're handcuffing reporters and detaining them.

A liberal blogger who was manhandled by Republican U.S. Sen. George Allen's supporters earlier in the week was handcuffed and taken away by police Saturday after an Allen backer claimed the man pushed him to the ground at a campaign rally.

A deputy sheriff said Mike Stark was not under arrest but was placed in "investigative detention" in case supporters of Allen — who is in a tight race with Democrat Jim Webb — wanted to press charges.

The incident occurred at the end of a rally at the Shenandoah Valley Regional Airport after Allen supporters continually jockeyed to position themselves between Allen and Stark, who said he wanted to ask the senator about his arrest record. An Albemarle County court index book shows two summonses issued for Allen in 1974, but supporting documents were destroyed long ago. Allen has said he offenses were for fishing without a license and unpaid parking tickets.

As Stark tried to sidestep the human wall formed to shield Allen at Saturday's rally, he brushed past a person who then fell. A deputy sheriff grabbed Stark, put the man's arm behind his back and led him away to the cheers of about 100 Allen supporters.

• Who are you going to believe, military recruiters or your lying eyes?

An ABC News undercover investigation showed Army recruiters telling students that the war in Iraq was over, in an effort to get them to enlist.

ABC News and New York affiliate WABC equipped students with hidden video cameras before they visited 10 Army recruitment offices in New York, New Jersey and Connecticut.

"Nobody is going over to Iraq anymore?" one student asks a recruiter.

"No, we're bringing people back," he replies.

"We're not at war. War ended a long time ago," another recruiter says.

16 US soldiers have died already this month in that war that ended a long time ago.

• I'd like to know how a TV commentator gains access to private medical records:

Two abortion clinics asked the state's highest court Monday to investigate Attorney General Phill Kline and Fox television's Bill O'Reilly over O'Reilly's statements that he had information from Kansas abortion records.

A Kline spokeswoman called the move "a political ploy."

The clinics' attorneys want the Kansas Supreme Court to seize records that Kline, an outspoken abortion opponent, obtained on 90 of the clinics' patients [...]

O'Reilly said Friday on his show "The O'Reilly Factor" that an inside source gave him information that a doctor at one of the clinics, George Tiller, had performed late-term abortions because patients were depressed. O'Reilly deemed it "executing babies."

Distributing medical records to unauthorized persons is a crime.

• Incidentally, another one of the more delicious victories on Election Day would be when Paul Morrison defeats the aforementioned Phill Kline in the Attorney General's race in Kansas. Kline is as far-right as you can get, but that doesn't even fit Kansas anymore.

• Think Progress offers 109 reasons to dump the 109th Congress. They could have doubled it.