http://www.nydailynews.com/news/politics/2008/08/20/2008-08-20_barack_obamas_povertystricken_halfbrothe.html

Michelle Obama, poor-mouthing  about still paying off student loans (the Obamas made more than $4 million in 2007, and $900,000 in 2006, so those loans must have been very large), was reported by The New Yorker in a story put up here, as complaining:

"You’re looking at a young couple that’s just a few years out of debt,” Obama said. “See, because, we went to those good schools, and we didn’t have trust funds. I’m still waiting for Barack’s trust fund. Especially after I heard that Dick Cheney was s’posed to be a relative or something. Give us something here!”

Perhaps, before asking her husband's very very distant relative Dick Cheny to "give us something here," Michelle Obama might suggest that in an act of charity -- Save-the-Children-Federation, that kind of thing -- her husband, Barack Obama, to the greater glory (ad majorem gloriam) of whom hundreds of millions of dollars have been raised, might do the handsome thing and perhaps spare a thousand dollars or so for a much closer relative than he is to Dick Cheney -- to wit, his half-brother in Kenya.

After all, if thinking in those family-tie terms comes so easily to Michelle Obama, surely she will urge her husband to do unto others as she would apparently have at least some of them do unto her.

It would mean so little to the Obama finances.

And it would mean so much, there can be no doubt, to Obama's half-brother. 

Or is African poverty going to be solved, in an Obama administration, another way -- by handing over (so Obama has suggested) another fifty billion dollars in taxpayers' money to add to the coffers of the Big Men who everywhere rule, and to their retinue of waBenzi profiteers?