Obama Speaks in Sioux Ci-- oops! Sioux Falls!

Senator Barack Obama takes the stage at 7:30 p.m. and exclaims, "Thank you, Sioux City!" Oops... thankfully, the good Senator catches himself, notes he spent eight months campaigning in Iowa.

Senator Obama notes that Tom Daschle has been with him from the beginning, when there weren't a lot of "poobahs" backing him.

Obama says when he announced, people asked him why he was running now, so early. You're young, people told him, you can afford to wait. "I'm not running because it's my turn... I'm running because of something Dr. King called the fierce urgency of now." He says wages are lower now than seven years ago, groceries and gas and everything else cost more, 47 million people don't have health insurance, those who are ensured have seen premiums go up as much as 78%. "We can't afford to wait to solve those problems."

Obama talks about his community organizing in Chicago's South Side, working to bring the white, black, and Latino communities together to bring jobs to the communities the steel mills abandoned.

--nuts! And then just as some interesting disruption in the crowd catches everyone's attention, including Obama's, the video feed goes down. Grr!

Audio comes back: we hear Obama say we don't need warrantless wiretaps or tax cuts for the rich. And he says John McCain will continue those policies and the other failures of the Bush Administration.

"Not every problem is the fault of just one party or just one person. We've been talking about the health care system for decades now." Obama says the drug and insurance companies have spent one billion dollars in the last decade to prevent health care reform. Ditto on oil and energy: Obama says the only thing that has changed since the 1970s oil crises has been that we import more oil. Why doesn't energy policy doesn't work? Well, Bush put Cheney in charge of energy policy, Cheney met with the oil and gas companies 40 times, the renewable outfits and environmental groups once. It's not enough to just change the political parties in charge; we've got to reduce the influence of special interests, which is what Obama's support of lobbying reforms last year was about. That's why Obama says his campaign is not taking money from PACs and registered lobbyists.

Step two: truth-telling! Obama notes McCain's support for the gas tax holiday (he doesn't mention Clinton here!). Obama says the Illinois experiment with cutting the gas tax showed the oil companies don't lower the prices. The real way to reduce oil prices is invest in alternative energy, raise auto fuel efficiency standards ("and save the planet in the bargain").

Ah, someone puts up a Hillary sign (Anna, did you fly in?), and Obama says, let that person do it. It's a free country, we're a unified party. "There'll be a lot of Hillary signs at the convention; there'll be a lot of Obama signs too." He does suggest the Hillary supporter think about the people behind her who can't see -- "that's just being neighborly."