LIGHTNING ROUND: BAILIN' ON THE BAILOUT.

• John McCain lays out his "bailout principles" in Michigan today, while Barack Obama describes "four conditions" that should accompany the bailout. Meanwhile, Rasmussen finds that only 35 percent of the public thinks the bailout will help the economy, and that 49 percent trust McCain more, to Obama's 43 percent. Pew, on the other hand, reports that 57 percent said the government was doing the right thing, and Obama is preferred over McCain on the issue, 47-35 percent.
  
• Palin isn't just ruffling feathers in Alaska. Annoyed by the McCain campaign's extensive control over media access to Palin as she meets with select world leaders in New York today, CNN threatened to pull its cameras from the event -- the only ones that would have covered it. Don't fear, though, 29 dazzling seconds of Palin talking to Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai about their kids is now available.
• Stanley Kurtz, who has been agitating for months to get access to "internal records" at the Chicago Annenberg Challenge in order to find a link between Barack Obama and '60s radical Bill Ayers, finally delivers the goods in The Wall Street Journal. Check out this revelation: "Yet the archives show that, along with Ms. Leff and Ms. Graham, Mr. Ayers was one of a working group of five who assembled the initial board in 1994. Mr. Ayers founded CAC and was its guiding spirit. No one would have been appointed the CAC chairman without his approval." So, the only way Obama would have gotten on that board would be to share Ayer's views, right? Is that what Kurtz is implying? I don't know, because the title of the piece is "Obama and Ayers Pushed Radicalism on Schools," but the article doesn't go into Obama's supposed radicalism. He only says, "As CAC chairman, Mr. Obama was lending moral and financial support to Mr. Ayers and his radical circle."
  
• Joe Biden, who the press never tire of reminding us is "gaffe-prone," calls the Obama campaign's ad featuring McCain's computer illiteracy "terrible."
• Questioning Bill Clinton's commitment to the Obama campaign is the pundit's favorite pastime. But regardless of Clinton's enthusiasm, it's worth noting that the former president is campaigning for Obama in key swing states and hosting fundraisers next week.
• Daniel McCarthy reports in The American Conservative that the Bob Barr campaign has "imploded." Huh, who would have known? In other third-party news, Ralph Nader claims his presence on the ballot actually takes votes away from McCain, not Obama.
• Brian Schaffner -- in lieu of data on new voter-registration party affiliation -- breaks down which counties new voters hail from in Virginia.
• In a recent interview, Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki cited the "political circumstances related to the [U.S] domestic situation" as the reason for Bush's change of dates for withdrawal from Iraq. Think Progress cites a source who claims the "White House communications staff were concerned that Maliki’s endorsement of the 2010 time line would damage Sen. John McCain’s (R-AZ) presidential campaign."

--Mori Dinauer