Friday!

* The ping-pong match in the press over the public option continues. Nobody can figure out whether or not Pelosi has the votes, whether or not Obama supports an Olympia-Snowe-style trigger, or just what will happen with the cloture vote in the Senate. Ezra Klein compares the likely House and Senate bills, which leads Matt Yglesias to suggest a best-of-both-worlds approach. Meanwhile a Daily Kos/Research 2000 poll shows that public support for the public option remains steady at around 60%, which would be important if the Senate were a properly representative body.

* Lots of buzz today about Neill Blomkamp's next film after District 9, described by SCI FI Wire as a balls-out sci-fi epic.

* 'A Mid-Atlantic Miracle': Keeping public university costs down in Maryland.

* A judge has ruled the war crimes case against Blackwater/Xe will go forward.

* 'Living on $500,000 a Year': Reading F. Scott Fitzgerald's tax returns. John Scalzi compares Fitzgerald's income and lifestyle to a writer's today.

* Fox News CEO Roger Ailes for president? This would take "fair and balanced" to a whole new level.

* And your entirely random chart of the day: The Population of Rome Through History. Via Kottke.

Actual results liveblogging for the Chesapeake Regional. MSNBC doesn't seem do be doing a live Internet feed tonight, so I'm forced to endure the Clinton News Network feed.

10:05 pm: Like a fool, I went and stayed too long. I think that's all for me tonight. Another really good night for the Barack Nation, one that I think rewrites a lot of the narrative going into the primary's home stretch...

9:52 pm: Obama going hard after McCain. Seems like a smart move.

9:45 pm: Obama floats a few new buzzwords: Obamacan, New American Majority...

9:43 pm: "Cynics can no longer say our hope is false..." I've been saying for a while now that Hillary is going to regret saying "false hopes" and "reality check" more than anything else she may regret this primary season.

9:38 pm: Obama on.

9:31 pm: CNN calls Maryland for Obama immediately, as expected.

9:29 pm: As best I can tell, Clinton's sole argument for her candidacy is this universal health care misrepresentation.

...oh wait, she's got something else. She wants to stop the foreclosure of people's homes. Obama, of course, delights in foreclosures from the inner sanctum of his giant money bin.

9:12 pm: Clinton says Obama is all hat and no cattle. Fighting words!

Meanwhile, Obama has taken the delegate lead (including superdelegates) even at CNN, which up to now has tried to rig their delegate count for Clinton in just about every way possible.

9:10 pm: I'm told that that Chesterfield County is now fixed. Hillary's talking now.

8:59 pm: They're playing Hillary's entrance music now. Clap clap, point point.

8:58 pm: Carville on CNN reflects the conventional wisdom; Clinton has to win all three of OH, TX, and PA to be the nominee. I'm not convinced she's the nominee even if she wins all three—at this point it depends on the margins, and I'm not sure she can win them by enough, if she can win them all.

8:55 pm: A reader mails into Michael Crowley about the "ultimate Hillary disaster scenario":

Could it be that downscale voters are also "low-information" voters when compared with their Volvo-driving broadband-surfing upscale brethren? If so, it would suggest that all it was going to take was a bit of time for the word to get through that Obama is looking like a winner. Wealthier voters may be the leading edge of a wave. Downscale voters may be the ones who catch trends later--and then really give them mass market power. If so, it's bad news for Senator Clinton going into Ohio and Pennsylvania.

This seems plausible to me, and I think it's reflected in Al Giordano's crunching of the exits.

8:45 pm: More interesting numbers: "As of 8:29, with 66% reporting, 465,364 Dem ballot choices vs, 223,601 Rep." That bodes very well for November. With the right candidate, Virginia could flip.

8:36 pm: Clinton coming on in El Paso in a few minutes. It's on C-SPAN2; probably will be on other channels too.

8:35 pm: Virginia called for McCain. But Huck will rise again.

8:31 pm: Polling the later states: Obama starting to run away with North Carolina, too...

8:25 pm: MSNBC reports (and Ben Smith elaborates) that Mike Henry, Clinton's deputy campaign manager, has also just resigned, following Patti Solis Doyle. That's not a story they wanted in the papers tonight.

8:19 pm: Someone on CNN—didn't catch the name—says that ideally the voters should decide the result, but "if it's not clear-cut, the superdelegates may have to step in to decide things." But this is precisely ass-backwards—the only reason the voter's decision can't be clear cut is because of the existence of 700+ superdelegates, which places a total delegate majority out of reach in anything but a blowout.

If there were no superdelegates, Obama would more or less have the nomination sewn up after tonight.

CNN's been hitting this superdelegate issue over and over tonight, by the way. The Clinton people must think it's their only chance.

8:15 pm: Looking through the county-by-county results, Jaimee notices something strange: with 96.92% of the precincts reporting, Barack has 12,280 votes in Chesterfield County; Bill Richardson has 11, Hillary has zero. I'm an Obama fan, but that can't be right, can it? We need electoral reform in this country, very very badly.

8:10 pm: Barack holding onto his 30-point lead in Virgnia, with 45% in, while McCain is holding onto his slim 3% lead thus far.

8:02 pm: Shock! Obama wins D.C.

7:56 pm: A friend writes in with news from the ground in Virginia:

So I just talked to my mother, the yellow-dog Republican (wait--can someone be a yellow-dog Republican? Or is there some other colorful animal for Republicans?), who says she voted today for Obama (as did "everyone [she works] with") because she figured McCain would definitely win, and she wanted to put in a protest vote against Hillary.

It's a twisted process, but I have to say, I like the product.

7:50 pm: Via Shankar, Ben Smith has more numbers: Obama wins Latinos, 55-45, I think for the first time. The CNN exits have even worse news for Clinton: the same percentage say Obama is "most qualified to be Commander-in-Chief."

7:45 pm: My dad writes in to say they're keeping the polls in Maryland open 90 more minutes. I've heard reports of high traffic on the Beltway, so this is probably why—though my experience of Beltway gridlock suggests that 90 minutes won't nearly be enough. (CNN confirms: traffic problems caused by the bad weather.)

7:45 pm: With 23% in, Obama is leading 61-38, while McCain and Huckabee keep flipflopping. Ben Smith has some more interesting number-crunching at the Politco—Clinton winning Western V.A., Obama taking everything else.

He won white men, with 55 percent. He won religious Catholics, with 54 percent. He got 46 percent of the vote of white Catholics, a group with which some have theorized he's weak. He won every income category, though his support skews toward the higher brackets. He won women and men.

Clinton's base of support was white Democrats, who gave her 59 percent of their vote. She also won among whites older than 45, losing younger white voters. But Obama's strong performance with independent voters made the white vote very close — he got 48 percent to her 51 percent.

Meanwhile, he won 90 percent, the most yet, of the support of black voters.

7:34 pm: CNN reports that Obama won late deciders, but not very late deciders—people who decided in the last 24 hours flipped back to Hillary. I think this is a result we've seen elsewhere; very late deciders seem to go with the safe bet, the name they know.

7:25 pm: CNN's viewers aren't buying their attempt to spin the superdelegate issue—the emails they're reading on CNN.com are pretty angry about this.

7:20 pm: Noam Scheiber says "Virginia may almost be a mirror image of New Hampshire: Independents, assuming McCain had the state in the bag, may have decided to participate in what they (mistakenly) believed would be a closer race on the other side." Makes sense. This is as good a time as any to push my New Hampshire revisionism, namely that the narrow loss in New Hampshire may have saved the Obama campaign by preventing her from the more incompetent members of her staff (*cough* Mark Penn *cough*) as she'd been rumored to be planning. If she'd been able to bring Carville in a month ago, I suspect she'd be doing a whole lot better now.

7:14 pm: Wolf really laying into Kerry on CNN.com Live, basically asking him over and over to promise to vote for Hillary in his capacity as a super "automatic" delegate. Finally Kerry just has to laugh at him.

7:08 pm: Read in the DKos comment thread that "Obama getting the biggest support from whites in any state to date." That fits with the Fox exits I linked to below; only a 3% difference separating the two in the white vote.

7:01 pm: Fox and CNN both call Virginia for Obama, "twenty-three seconds after the polls close." Virginia was the only state of the three that people thought Clinton might surprise in, so that's good news. Of course it's the margin of victory that really matters here—we need to wait to see how many delegates he's actually going to snag here.

6:57 pm: CNN teasing results "at the top of the hour." I like the sound of that.

6:54 pm: Fox's exit poll demographics are incredible. Obama winning young voters 80-20; winning women; winning seniors...

It's not long until we know for sure, but Drudge's leaked exit polls show Obama with a 2-1 lead in Virginia and Maryland and a 3-1 lead in DC. (UPDATE: The Republican race looks a whole lot tighter. Can the Huckabee surge continue?) Everyone's reporting record turnout, which is also a very good sign. Sit tight...

For what it's worth, The Field's Al Giordano—who for my money has had the best state-by-state analysis of anyone these last few weeks—looks at the internals of the last SurveyUSA poll before the Chesapeake Regional and advises us to throw caution to the wind:

Although many are saying that Obama will come out of tomorrow with an extra 25 to 30 delegates over Clinton, The Field thinks it will be closer to 45.

The reason: “Safe” Clinton voters are moving rapidly toward “undecided” and are telling pollsters “might change my mind” and as many Virginians, Marylanders and Washingtonians that came to DC to take jobs with them – sixteen years later – begin to show buyer’s remorse, the jig is almost up.

Obviously, Al has never been a Mets fan. But he makes a good case.

Some links about the primary, everyone's favorite discussion topic. (TV will be back soon; this is all almost over.)

* I know more than a few people in DC, Maryland, and Virginia, and I hope these people get out and vote for Obama their conscience for Obama today. The last ARG poll—as I've said, not the friendliest poll outfit for Obama—has numbers that look pretty fantastic, not that they mean anything until the real polls close tonight. ARG has Barack in the lead by twenty points in both states, including in key demographics like "men" and "women." There's room to be cautiously optimistic here.

* The front page of the New York Times today paints the picture of a Clinton campaign in crisis:

“She has to win both Ohio and Texas comfortably, or she’s out,” said one superdelegate who has endorsed Mrs. Clinton, and who spoke on condition of anonymity to share a candid assessment. “The campaign is starting to come to terms with that.” Campaign advisers, also speaking privately in order to speak plainly, confirmed this view.

Several Clinton superdelegates, whose votes could help decide the nomination, said Monday that they were wavering in the face of Mr. Obama’s momentum after victories in Washington State, Nebraska, Louisiana and Maine last weekend.

Some said that they, like the hundreds of uncommitted superdelegates still at stake, might ultimately “go with the flow,” in the words of one, and support the candidate who appears to show the most strength in the primaries to come.

This of course is what I've been saying all along—the superdelegates are politicians, they aren't going to cut their own throats and the throat of the Democratic party writ large. If Obama is ahead in pledged delegates, he'll be the nominee.

Hopefully he can get a win in OH, TX, or PA, though—a win in any of those three would seal it.

* Josh Patashnik succinctly explains at the Plank why the Florida delegates must not be seated.

* CNN's Political Ticker has a post up that backs up my latest theory about what Al Gore is waiting for. Thanks Neil.

The sources say Gore talks with both Clinton and Obama, and is on good terms with both. But with Sen. John Kerry and Bill Clinton both aligned to a candidate, Gore has a role to serve as the neutral elder statesman in the party.

If an agreement needs to be struck between Clinton and Obama down the road, Gore is in position to be the likely facilitator of that discussion.