Pun Salad

• James Taranto meditates [last item] amusingly on how Andrew's disgust with Mitt Romney and love of Madonna leads him to deem the latter "closer to Jesus' authentic teachings" while the former is deemed the foreordained candidate of the "Christianists," despite (gasp!) not being a Christian himself. Yeah, that makes perfect sense.

  As a bonus, Taranto quotes Andrew extensively, boldfacing each use of "Christianist/Christianism". It brings to mind the classic observation of Inigo Montoya: "You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means."

• Ann Althouse is pretty put out with Andrew's willingness to use Romney's anti-gay-marriage stance as a pretext to belittle Mormons generally.

• And up-n-comer Glenn Reynolds offers links and commentary (a) refuting the usefulness of Andrew's "Christianist" meme; (b) demonstrating the superficiality of Andrew's political analysis; (c) rubbing it in.

Ahem. Near the top of that list of policies is sugar protectionism, a policy with no other rationale besides moving money from the pockets of ordinary people into the bank accounts of sugar producers. Don Boudreaux at Cafe Hayek comments on yet another dysfunctional symptom of this policy: it makes the use of sugar-derived ethanol for energy economically unfeasible in the US. He also points to a free link to a good further explanation of the issue by James Surowecki in the New Yorker, worth reading, although there's no indication that the New Yorker crowd will start wholeheartedly embracing free-market capitalism anytime soon.

Holiday gift-giving is a tradition that dates back roughly 2,006 years, to when the Three Wise Men went to Bethlehem with gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh for the Baby Jesus. Of course the next day the Virgin Mary returned these items for store credit, because she was a low-income mother with a newborn, and as the old saying goes, ''You can't diaper a baby with frankincense.''