The buttongroup is great at managing its own state, ie when I click one of the modal buttons it puts itself in the selected (checked) state and puts the other buttons in the unselected state. However, there are other actions in the app that can change its state and the button bar needs to react and hilite (select, check, etc.) the correct button. It appears from the button documentation that I could do something like this:

$('#radio3).button("option", checked, [false]);

$('#radio2).button("option", checked, [true]);

or