IOWA INSIDER

John Kerry pulled out a few zingers during an appearance in Ames Wednesday.

Kerry mocked Sarah Palin’s claims she had foreign policy experience because her home state of Alaska was near Russia. Her comments were parodied by Tina Fey on Saturday Night Live. Fey, playing Palin, said she had foreign policy because “I can see Russia from my house.”

Kerry carried the joke a step further at the Ames event.

“I was in Wisconsin yesterday and I felt really, really good, because when you’re in Wisconsin, you can look out and almost see Canada,” Kerry said to laughs from the crowd. “I felt truly empowered.”

Among the other cracks:

– Looking back on his 2004 race he thanked Iowans.
“You bled, you gave money you didn’t have, you gave time you didn’t have and canvassed – everything except move to Ohio,” Kerry said, the state he notoriously lost.

– The line on the presidential race:
“The odds makers in Vegas have it down right. The Red Sox can come back. John McCain can’t.”

Calls and mail pieces blaming Barack Obama and congressional Democrats for taking a summer vacation after the floods hit Iowa are being called “disgraceful” by the Obama campaign.

Joye Winey of Cedar Rapids, a Democrat and Obama supporter, reported receiving both a flyer and a call.

“I don’t think it’s a very appropriate thing for anybody to be using the flood and flood victims to get votes,” she said. “You know, this is our little 9/11 out here, even though we didn’t have people die, and it’s kind of an untouchable thing.”

She said while Obama has helped secure flood aid, Republican John McCain has only shown up for photo-ops.

Campaign flyers sent to Iowans funded by the Republican National Committee show a flooded building along with sandbags superimposed with the words “Iowans deserve better.”

“Iowans needed our help,” the flyer says. “But Barack Obama and his Democrat Congress went on vacation.”

The flyers also include a picture of Republican nominee John McCain and a pledge that a McCain administration “will respond to natural disasters with the speed they demand.”

Democrats who control Congress faced criticism when they adjourned for their summer recess before approving additional flood aid for Iowa and other Midwestern states.

A notation on the flyers says they were authorized by McCain-Palin 2008. McCain campaign spokeswoman Wendy Riemann referred questions to a Republican National Committee official, who did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Obama’s Iowa spokesman, Brad Anderson, asked the McCain campaign to reconsider the strategy.

“At a time when Cedar Rapids families are trying to put their lives back together, put their homes back together, and open up their small businesses, this is the last thing they want to hear,” Anderson said. “It’s frankly disgraceful to start politicizing the flood in the last couple weeks of an election and a time when there’s so many challenges out there in Cedar Rapids.”