Tuesday bits.

* Is it Tim Kaine? Staffers called in from all across Virginia for emergency meeting to discuss line of succession if Kaine steps down as governor.

* A Veronica Mars movie?

* Ten weird medical conditions, including the woman who can't stop orgasming, the girl allergic to water, and the boy who can't sleep.

* McCain goes after the Dungeons and Dragons lobby.

* Remember that whole Solzhenitsyn plagiarism thing? Turns out the original story was falsely attributed to Solzhenitsyn and actually came from a right-winger named Chuck Colson.

* And everyone is happy Rachel Maddow's been given her own show.

Late night.

* 'Our Phony Economy': Why measuring GDP doesn't tell us much of anything we need to know. In Harper's, via MeFi.

The purpose of an economy is to meet human needs in such a way that life becomes in some respect richer and better in the process. It is not simply to produce a lot of stuff. Stuff is a means, not an end. Yet current modes of economic measurement focus almost entirely on means. For example, an automobile is productive if it produces transportation. But today we look only at the cars produced per hour worked. More cars can mean more traffic and therefore a transportation system that is less productive. The medical system is the same. The aim should be healthy people, not the sale of more medical services and drugs. Now, however, we assess the economic contribution of the medical system on the basis of treatments rather than results. Economists see nothing wrong with this. They see no problem that the medical system is expected to produce 30 to 40 percent of new jobs over the next thirty years. “We have to spend our money on something,” shrugged a Stanford economist to the New York Times. This is more insanity. Next we will be hearing about “disease-led recovery.” To stimulate the economy we will have to encourage people to be sick so that the economy can be well.

* Springfield Punx Simpsonizes celebrities and superheroes. At right: Tobias Fünke.

* Al Giordano says Tim Kaine is growing on him for VP.

The number one rule in choosing a vice presidential nominee is "first, do no harm." If you're a presidential nominee, you don't want a running mate that will distract from you, commit gaffes, speak off-message, or that secretly thinks he or she is too good to be number two.

And the second rule is, "then, do some good." You want a VP that will reinforce your messages and make voters more comfortable with you.

Kaine is so far passing both tests with flying colors.

I'm not there yet—as I've mentioned before, just about everything I hear about Kaine turns me off—but Al's instincts have never steered me wrong. I guess we'll see.

* What are the essential reads in literary fantasy? Personally I'd have to start my list with heavy-hitters from the twentieth century (and my bookshelf) like Kafka, Borges, García Márquez, and Calvino...

* Mission accomplished, corporations! Wal-Mart employee voluntarily enforces her entirely false belief that "copyright lasts forever."

* And will Burn After Reading, the new Coen Brothers comedy, be the new greatest movie of all time? All signs point to yes:

More eco and politics links.

* From the comments comes a link to drive55.org, a web site devoted to popularizing the largely defunct 55 mph speed limit in the name of carbon efficiency. A thing like this is long on science but short of politics—I don't think I know a single person who voluntarily limits their speed, and I know a whole lot of hippies and eco-freaks. Better to advocate policies that eliminate people's need to drive, like functional light and high-speed rail systems, than to try and rewrite human nature.

* Has the high price of oil put the brakes on globalization?

* John McCain: "A surprisingly immature politician."

* See also: Multiple Oil Company Executives Gave Huge Contributions To Electing McCain Just Days After Offshore Drilling Reversal. More at Grist, including a sharp new Obama ad.

* Why Kaine over Sebelius?

So far as I can tell, Kaine's advantages over Sebelius consist of these: his swing-state residency (not useless, but I thought consensus is that picking veeps for their regional influence is so last century), his faith (he's Roman Catholic), and his Y chromosome.

Update: Several readers point out Sebelius is also Catholic.

It's a good case, even if it shoots my Virginia Strategem to hell; the more I find out about Kaine the more I sour on him. More here.

There's been a whole lot of talk the last few days about Gov. Tim Kaine of Virginia, with the pundits finally catching up to the renowned wisdom of my good friend Shankar D. And if the Shankaristas are right, at least I was half-right—I picked Virginia two months ago, but after cycling through Webb, Kaine, and Warner a few times I settled on Warner for pragmatic reasons. The Virginia statehouse and Webb's Senate seat are birds in the hand, while Warner's likely Senate seat is still off there in the bush. (That, and also the fact that Kaine's nominal pro-life stance makes a lot of progressive activists very nervous.)

The only question is: is this chatter a genuine leak, is it a trial balloon, or is it a courtesy because Kaine's not being picked? We'll find out soon, I guess.

There's more discussion at Raising Kaine, where the response from the commenters is surprisingly tepid.

Gore won't be VP. We already knew this, but it's still a shame. As (mostly) happy as I've been with Obamania thus far, there's nonetheless a part of me that still wishes Al had run, won, and then picked Obama for VP. I would have been very happy to place a RE-ELECT GORE sticker on the bumper of our Jetta.

Meanwhile, Mark Ambinder has the list of who apparently is being vetted. Shankar's pick, Virginia Governor Tim Kaine, is on the list, but my choice of Mark Warner is conspicuously absent.