John McCain and Sarah Palin will hold a rally at the Eastern Iowa Airport outside Cedar Rapids this morning at 10:00 am.

Somehow I doubt they will address any of Kansas Governor Kathleen Sebelius’s five questions for McCain.

Apparently the Q&A didn’t go too well at a McCain/Palin town hall meeting yesterday:

Asked for “specific skills” she could cite to rebut critics who question her grasp of international affairs, she replied, “I am prepared.”

“I have that confidence. I have that readiness,” Palin said. “And if you want specifics with specific policies or countries, you can go ahead and ask me. You can play ‘stump the candidate’ if you want to. But we are ready to serve.”

GOP presidential nominee John McCain stepped in, pointing out that as governor of a state that is oil and gas plentiful, Palin was familiar with energy. She knows it to be “one of our great national security challenges,” he said.

He also cited her nearly two years as commander of Alaska’s National Guard. “I believe she is absolutely, totally qualified to address every challenge as the next vice president of the United States,” McCain said.

McCain frequently says Palin knows more about energy than anyone else in America, even though she has falsely claimed many times that Alaska provides 20 percent of the energy produced in the U.S. In fact, Alaska doesn’t even provide 20 percent of U.S. oil.

This is an open thread for discussing the Cedar Rapids rally or any other McCain/Palin related news.

UPDATE: The Des Moines Register is carrying the live video here.

After the jump you can read a statement from Jan Laue, Executive Vice-President of the Iowa Federation of Labor, AFL-CIO.

SECOND UPDATE: I only caught bits and pieces, but apparently McCain and Palin were hammering Joe Biden for supposedly saying that raising taxes is patriotic. Not surprisingly, they distort what he really said, which is that it would be patriotic for the wealthiest Americans to do their part by paying more taxes:

“We want to take money and put it back in the pocket of middle-class people,” Biden said in an interview on ABC’s “Good Morning America.”

Noting that wealthier Americans would indeed pay more, Biden said: “It’s time to be patriotic … time to jump in, time to be part of the deal, time to help get America out of the rut.”

On a trivial note, I was pretty sure I heard the Boy Scout leader or whoever he was flub the Pledge of Allegiance toward the beginning of the rally (I think he said “one nation, under God, individual”). If that happened at an Obama rally it would be the day’s top scandal on right-wing talk radio: Democrats don’t know the pledge!!

I’ve never understood why Republicans think this country is worth dying for, but it’s not worth raising taxes on the wealthiest 1 percent.

THIRD UPDATE: I highly recommend John Deeth’s liveblog of this event, which includes lots of photos.

I also enjoyed Radio Iowa’s write-up, especially this passage:

I look up, about five minutes into McCain’s address and see a steady stream of people walking out of the rally.  They just came to see Palin apparently.

For Immediate Release.  Contact: Rachele Huennekens, 202-637-5006

Statement by Jan Laue, Executive Vice-President of the Iowa Federation of Labor, AFL-CIO, On McCain-Palin Campaign Rally in Cedar Rapids

September 17, 2008

It is deeply ironic that John McCain and Sarah Palin, whose economic philosophy can be summed up as: “you’re on your own,” are campaigning on Thursday in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, where thousands of working families are struggling to recover from this summer’s record flooding on top of weathering the turbulent economy.  As they attempt to rebuild their lives and economic futures, McCain’s and Palin’s plans to continue the George W. Bush legacy of putting corporate profit over working families’ needs couldn’t be less welcome.

McCain’s and Palin’s lofty campaign claims to be agents of change simply don’t match up the reality of their economic policies.  The centerpiece of the plan is $175 billion a year in tax cuts for corporations – cuts that would give Big Oil alone $4 billion a year.   Also on the Bush-McCain-Palin agenda are more tax giveaways for the very wealthy, a hands-off approach to reining in corporations that ship jobs overseas and exploit tax loopholes, a plan to privatize Social Security, and no real solutions on energy independence or health care. In fact, McCain’s health care plan would impose a new tax on health benefits and cut back employer-provided health care, pushing more workers onto the private insurance market to fend for themselves.

It’s obvious that McCain still doesn’t get it. Despite the collapse of the financial markets and the economic crisis, just this week he said the “fundamentals of the economy are strong,” a phrase he’s repeated time and time again.

The choice between the Obama-Biden and McCain-Palin tickets is clear for working women and men in Cedar Rapids and across Iowa , who know from their kitchen table choices that it is time for a change.  Barack Obama and Joe Biden are committed to putting communities-not corporations-first and helping average people get our fair share.

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Paid for by the AFL-CIO Committee on Political Education (COPE) Political Contributions Committee, http://www.aflcio.org, and not authorized by any candidate or candidate’s committee.