Not a good morning in Stamford.

Daniela Altimari, with Jon Lender, dropped an extensive report in this morning's Courant about the use of drugs by wrestlers at Linda McMahon's WWE. The hot issue for Congressional investigators and journalists over the years has usually been steroids. But as the Courant reports and as some of those same people have told us, the insidious abuse of painkillers is perhaps a greater health risk for wrestlers.

The pressure to keep competing, to fight through injury by any available means, can have devastating consequences. Including, eventually, death.

The Courant story gives plenty of space to the WWE to talk about the company's wellness policy, including an interview with wrestler MVP, who says the company's health screening helped detect a serious health problem.

The question that dogs McMahon is not whether her company is running a vigorous drug screening problem now (as opposed to the past). The company urges reporters to compare its steroid and (relatively newer) drug testing to the NFL or international anti-doping regimens.

It seems the real question is not whether the company is taking action to monitor whether its independent contractors are taking unsafe risks in order to perform. It's whether the industry the company has helped to build is inextricable from a culture where those risks are taken, where dangerous self-medication is inevitable, and where death, as Richard Blumenthal finally got around to arguing in the final Senate debate, is a cost of doing business.

Meanwhile, the Quinnipiac polls show a widening Blumenthal lead, and the New York Times both reflects on the gender gap in the race -- where female voters have consistently told pollsters they prefer Blumenthal -- and endorses the candidate who misstated his Vietnam service record.

Everyone I've talked to about this race expects a late slider from the McMahon campaign; if not an October surprise, at the very least a hard-hitting repackaging of some of its extant criticisms of Blumenthal and his political positions. With the millions she has pledged to spend, those people say, there must be one more devastating ad up their sleeve. Is there something they can do to close the gap?

That's the question for McMahon and her staff, the same one the late, great Tugger asked about his own fastball: Is that all there is?

Update: The Democrats are trying to press what they see as their advantage on the content of WWE programming. State party chair Nancy DiNardo, state Rep. Catherine Abercrombie, and anti-domestic violence advocate Amanda Posila denounced the company's depictions of women in a conference call with reporters today. The party also pointed reporters to the video at the end of this anti-McMahon blast at the Huffington Post: a compilation of scenes in which women are treated in demeaning or violent ways during WWE performances.