The following video is a collection of outtakes from You Bet Your Life with Groucho Marx. There is one bit where a woman is telling Groucho that he should come to their Almond festival or some such. She mentions that Dick Lane will be there. Groucho replies, “Well, if you have Dick Lane, I don’t think you need me.” You don’t have to know who Dick Lane is to get the joke—the fact that you’ve likely never heard of him is enough. I’ll bet Groucho didn’t know who he was either. But for the record, Dick Lane was a local Los Angeles TV announcer, most notable for his work for wrestling and roller derby.

We haven’t heard much from Paul Krugman recently. According to his sporadic blogging, he and his wife (Robin Wells) have been trapped in their house by a downed power line. He has apparently been blogging from his phone. Tonight came his first column since Hurricane Sandy hit. And it shows that he’s been in a bit of a media blackout because he’s writing about last Saturday’s Des Moines Register endorsement of Mitt Romney.

I’ve already written about the huge economics mistakes in the editorial. Krugman doesn’t touch this issue—probably because Dean Baker has already given it the business. Instead, he attacks the endorsement as an example of Romney supporters giving power to The Blackmail Caucus.

Pretty much all of the Romney endorsements that I’ve read have been the same: elect Romney because the Republicans in Congress will behave if a Republican is in the White House. There is, of course, much to say for that view. As I’ve noted before: if McCain had been President these last 4 years, we would likely have more liberal healthcare reform and some kind of cap and trade legislation.

Krugman argues that it is wrong to vote for this reason because it is the same as negotiating with terrorists:

I think there is an even better reason not to vote for Romney: he isn’t McCain of 2008. The legislation that Romney would get through Congress would be terrible. We not only wouldn’t get a better healthcare law, we would get a worse one: he will likely kill or gut Obamacare. We not only wouldn’t get global warming legislation, Romney would greatly increase fossil fuel drilling and likely lower fuel efficiency standards. I could go on. But the bottom line is that being more effective is a bad thing when your policies are as pernicious as Romney’s.

Matt Taibbi is angry—at a lot of different people, but mostly the media. He’s been watching how they have reacted to the storm. Before, the main thing was that Big Government was baaad. Small government was the way to go. I’ve written about this: journalists are almost all in the upper or upper-middle classes. As a result, when it comes to economic issues, they are conservative. But more to the point: they are selfish. If it affects them, it matters; if it doesn’t, not so much.

That has been brilliantly on display this week. I’m not suggesting that Sandy isn’t a big deal (although few in the media were that interested in all the Haitians who died before it hit the east coast). But they are clearly a lot more interested because it has affected New York and Washington. Taibbi notes that Hurricane Sandy was all that was necessary to turn the mainstream media into Big Government lovers. And thus Obama lovers.

Except, of course, that of the two candidates, Obama has a far better claim to being the Small Government guy. He’s the guy who has slashed the deficit, year after year. And Romney is Joe Isuzu giving away $5 trillion in new tax cuts and $2 trillion in new military spending. But just look at the record: Democrats are the fiscal conservatives.

Taibbi sees it a little differently. He thinks the federal budget will go way up regardless of who is elected President. Under normal circumstances, I would agree with him. (But don’t misunderstand me: in general, federal spending going up is a good thing.) But with the Republican House, I think we will see more of the obstructionism that has defined the last four years.

But Taibbi knows who the true villains are in all of this: the rich Randians who depend upon government largess that the poor could only dream of:

That’s right. But a big part of the problem is that the government goes out of its way to make welfare for the rich invisible just as it goes out of its way to make welfare for the poor as humiliating as possible. I once thought about getting food stamps. There were over 50 pages of documents to get as much as $200 per month in food assistance. The TARP loans of billions of dollars? Two pages.

We’ve got to get the government off the backs of the banks! Matt Taibbi isn’t wrong to be angry.

And I thought the crying child would be the best thing of the day. How wrong I was! Here is the Unskewed Polls projection of the presidential race:

All you need to know here is that every state that Romney has even the slightest chance of winning is given to him. So even in Minnesota where Obama leads in every poll by 3 to 8 percentage points, Unskewed Polls, in their infinite wisdom calls the state for Romney. If this sounds familiar: it should.

If this election goes more or less as the polls suggest, it’s going to be fun to drop over to the Unskewed Polls website next Wednesday. On the other hand, if they turn out to be right, I’ll be too depressed to even think about what went wrong.

This comes to me via Richard K. Barry over at The Reaction in an article titled, I So Totally Relate. So do I my friend; so do I.

There have been a few tweets the last couple of days speculating that in the event of a Romney loss, the Republicans will offer a new narrative. Most recently, this comes from Ben Smith at BuzzFeed, “Top Republicans are already hinting that if Romney loses, his people will blame the storm for stalling his momentum.” It goes like this: After the first debate, Romney’s campaign went into high gear. They were charging the finish line. They had momentum. They were going to win! But… The Hurricane. It destroyed Romney’s chances.

I don’t suppose this matters. If Romney loses, it will not cause the Republicans to admit that maybe their policies really are toxic. I think there is an important 47% in this country, but they aren’t the people who pay no federal income taxes. Instead, they are the people who find modern Republican values so vile they won’t vote for them regardless. (The number for Democrats is much lower: more like 35%.) That isn’t a lot of turf to fight over.

Before the hurricane, the narrative was going to be that Romney was too liberal. As Ann Coulter said, “If we don’t run Chris Christie, Romney will be the nominee, and we’ll lose.” The tendency among revolutionary movements is to treat losses as opportunities to purify. So the new narrative at least isn’t explicitly calling for more conservatism.

Regardless of the narrative the Republicans pick, the only way we can get them to move to the center is by defeating them in 2014. They have stayed alive (and even thrived) on the carcass of a broken electorate that just doesn’t show up for these off-year elections. If everyone voted, the United States would be a very blue country. So we need to spend the next two years convincing people that they must vote. Our very lives depend upon it.