• A guide to today’s primaries in North Carolina and Indiana, including a link to Keith Olberman’s excellent dissection of Hillary Clinton’s metrics for success.  (Via Stephen Hero’s Twitter stream.)

• The New Republic: The Audacity of Data: Barack Obama’s surprisingly non-ideological policy shop.
• NYT Op-Ed: A Card-Carrying Civil Libertarian
• Lessig: 20 minutes or so on why I am 4Barack

In a way it’ll be nice to see the end of Wisconsin primary coverage, so the national media can stop portraying the state as being filled with backwater, blue-color hicks with no education.

Hey, assholes, ever hear of the Wisconsin Idea?  How about the third-largest Hmong population in the United States?

Fuckers.  And, while we’re at it, god forbid we have a state that actually works for a living.

• A side-by-side comparison of Clinton and Obama’s health care plans (via MetaFilter). My brain hurts.

Well, Wisconsin, let’s see what you’re going to do.

As noted yesterday, Lisa and I won’t be out for the caucus tomorrow night, but I wanted to take a brief moment to mention my support for Barack Obama. Clinton and Obama’s positions are generally more similar than they are dissimilar (aside from the war, at least), and as such I’d be happy having either one as our president. That said, I believe Obama is the best candidate to positively engage our country in a way that hasn’t happened in my lifetime, and think he would be better at putting forth a progressive, collaborative approach to our foreign relations.

So, there are my two cents. Take them for what they’re worth.

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Bonus spare change: Neither Obama nor Clinton is really perfect for me. Both of their health care plans are messy, and both are way too focused on old-economy jobs and business that are more about where our country has been (manufacturing) than where it should be (technology, innovation and knowledge leadership). Comments from both of them framing immigration as contributing to employment problems practically horrify me. With the exception of specific individuals we can tangibly deem to be a threat to our nation’s security, I can find no ethical basis for us trying to keep people out, and that includes immigration limits like we have today. I think our immigration policy should be one of inclusion and outright recruitment—we should be doing everything we can to identify smart people overseas and to actively encourage them to make their permanent home here as American citizens. Anything less than that is just setting us up to be eclipsed by China, the European Union, and, probably, India.

If I could be a single-issue voter on immigration I probably would be, but all the likely candidates are kind of protectionist in this area, so I don’t really have that as an option.

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Also, go Al!

Buh bye. Don’t let the door hit you in the ass on the way out.