• CNBC is backing Maria Bartiromo because, really, what else do you know about CNBC apart from Maria Bartiromo? [NYT]
  

This has been around for a few days, but we hadn't seen it. Pretty awesome, no? Our favorite part is how "Barry" was apparently styled for his yearbook shoot by, like, Jermaine Jackson. No, wait, that's not our favorite part. Our favorite part is the "still life" featuring what we're assuming is a beer bottle and a book of matches. You know, like for lighting your drug cigarettes! So badass. We thought we'd go ahead and do the same kind of point-counterpoint with the Democratic presidential frontrunners that we did that other time; after the jump, the secretary of the chess club bares her chompers.

Get it? Because Barack Obama is a black man. Black. Also, Hillary is "waiting to exhale" after Obama's big declaration. Maybe she just needs to get back to her "roots" before Democratic voters give her the "shaft." We bet she wishes Obama was an "invisible man," because he seems much more "beloved" by the press.

Chicago Sun-Times columnist Lynn Sweet is already grappling almost as hard as we are with the tough issues surrounding the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination.

That's according to his wife, Michelle, in Ebony's February cover story on "The Hottest Couple in America" (also the source of this unusually passionate photograph). The article goes on to explain that Obama "lives two lives — one as a powerful lawmaker and another as a doting husband. And he's just fine with that." Obama is quoted as saying that Michelle likes to remind him that he is "still a man . . . she lets me know when I'm not acting right." Hillary, you know you can't compete with this display of connubial bliss. Wait . . . can you? Well, after the jump, the strong-stomached among us will witness your most valiant attempt to date.

Literary pugilist Stanley Crouch turns his eye to Barack Obama, the junior senator from Illinois, whom many believe will be this nation's first black president. Except, according to Crouch, he won't: "Obama's mother is of white U.S. stock. His father is a black Kenyan. Other than color, Obama did not - does not - share a heritage with the majority of black Americans, who are descendants of plantation slaves... when black Americans refer to Obama as 'one of us,' I do not know what they are talking about."

Today's Jon Friedman column concerns Illinois Senator Barack Obama, who appeared at this week's American Magazine Conference. It's the platonic ideal of a Friedman column, regurgitating the conventional wisdom while offering the meaningless on-the-one-hand, on-the-other-hand assessments (he actually uses the phrase "on the one hand") that have become his stock-in-trade. Our favorite part, though, comes when Friedman meets the man himself at a dinner: