Two policy items of note:

Planning out her campaign promises, Palin writes, “no automatic pay increase for the mayors position” and also “City Hall says it sees the need for an increase in sales and property tax to pay for some local politicians wish list. There is no need to raise taxes, Wasilla is collecting two million dollars a year than what we had projected when we sold the sales tax proposal to you four years ago.”

Both of these are forms of claims she has since made on the vice presidential stump - that she took a pay cut as mayor, and that she fought taxes.

On a recent reporting trip to Alaska, TNR senior editor Noam Scheiber came across a piece of paper from an old Wasilla city budget, on the back of which Palin doodled and brainstormed her potential mayoral campaign themes (”time for a change,” “you would be my boss!”) and qualifications (”life-long alaskan,” “NRA supporter,” ”taxpayer!”). Read the fine print on this 1996 document; it’s a fascinating glimpse into how she thought she could best present herself to the Wasilla electorate.

There seems to be a lot of interest in this document, so I thought I’d say a bit more about its provenance. I stumbled across it at the home of Laura Chase, a former colleague of Palin’s on the Wasilla city council who later managed her first race for mayor. (Chase makes a few appearances in my Palin profile this week.)

Toward the end of our interview, Chase brought out a box of odds and ends she’d saved from that campaign and emptied it onto her kitchen table. Buried in the pile of material were various pictures, mailings, correspondences, newspaper clippings–and this page of doodling. Chase didn’t remember a ton about it, but did tell me it had been written on the back of a budget document, which (she seemed to think) had been distributed at a Wasilla city council meeting.

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Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger in a letter Thursday night to Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr. said that with credit markets essentially frozen, the state, like a slew of others and local governments nationwide, had no access to the short-term financing that normally support day-to-day operations.

“California and other states may be unable to obtain the necessary level of financing to maintain government operations and may be forced to turn to the Federal treasury for short-term financing,” Mr. Schwarzenegger said in the letter, which was first reported by The Los Angeles Times.

Treasury officials said they were reviewing the letter.

As the nation’s most populous state, California’s precarious finances underscore the depths of the financial crisis. The emergency handout, the equivalent of $192 for each resident, would rival the federal government’s bailout of New York City in 1975 as it teetered on bankruptcy.