Michelle is not the kind of person most people like to be around. She is constantly whining about how hard everything is, with her Princeton and Harvard educations and all. It really must be a pressure cooker at the Obama house at the end of the month figuring out where the mortgage money is going to come from. Especially with such meager incomes.

Senator Barack Obama released his 2007 tax return on Wednesday evening, reporting a household income of $4.2 million due to a sharp increase in the sales of his books during the first year of his presidential campaign.

In 2006 it was even rougher, with creditors banging at the door and debtor’s prison looming.

That was a substantial jump from the roughly $1 million in income the Obamas reported in 2006, much of that also from book deals.

Yeah, life’s a bitch.

In spite of that, she still insists on whining about everything. Which makes her either a spoiled brat or a phony trying to curry favor with the bitter clingers. From Jim Geraghty, Michelle Obama’s greatest hits.

On men: “What I notice about men, all men, is that their order is me, my family, God is in there somewhere, but me is first.”

On women: “I wake up every morning wondering how on earth I am going to pull off that next minor miracle to get through the day. I know that everybody in this room is going through this. That is the dilemma women face today. Every woman that I know, regardless of race, education, income, background, political affiliation, is struggling to keep her head above water.” (This presumably includes her friend Oprah.)

On the state of plumbing in America: “How many of us have had to be the ones, when a child gets sick, who is the one who stays home? Or, when a toilet overflows? This was a couple of months ago. I was scrambling around to reschedule being at a 9 o’clock meeting and Barack, love him to death, put on his clothes and he left!”

On life in America: Obama begins with a broad assessment of life in America in 2008, and life is not good: we’re a divided country, we’re a country that is “just downright mean,” we are “guided by fear,” we’re a nation of cynics, sloths, and complacents.

On the nefarious labeling of products on supermarket shelves: “And the notion of trying to think about a lunch every day! . . . So you grab the Lunchables, right? And the fruit-juice-box thing, and we think—we think—that’s juice. And you start reading the labels and you realize there’s high-fructose corn syrup in everything we’re eating. Every jelly, every juice. Everything that’s in a bottle or a package is like poison in a way that most people don’t even know. . ”

On the high cost of fruit: “Now we’re keeping, like, a bowl of fresh fruit in the house. But you have to go to the fruit stand a couple of times a week to keep that fruit fresh enough that a six-year-old—she’s not gonna eat the pruney grape, you know. At that point it’s, like, ‘Eww!’ She’s not gonna eat the brown banana or the shrivelledy-up things. It’s got to be fresh for them to want it. Who’s got time to go to the fruit stand? Who can afford it, first of all?”

It’s called life. Toughen up cupcake.