Since we don’t have any major burning issues for this installment, it’s going to consist of many little things.

First, there is the Ashley Madison hack, which has produced a frenzy of people looking around for juicy gossip on their neighbors and friends. A list came out yesterday of 600 or so paid Ashley Madison subscribers, and then last night there was another list, this time of 7,900 paid customers throughout Louisiana.

There was another list which surfaced, not of paid customers but of people who had been to the site – which is essentially a Match.com for married people who want to cheat on their spouses – and had foolishly put in their e-mail addresses to be captured. When the site was hacked and its customer information delivered to the internet, those folks got burned as well.

Two people who have been associated with the Hayride, Ryan Heck and Jason Dore, have had their names in the media as a result of this.

Heck, the Baton Rouge Metro Councilman and candidate for the state House of Representatives, is not on the paid list. Five years ago he and some other people from his office were goofing off during some downtime and someone got the brilliant idea to look up Ashley Madison. Heck happened to be the goofball whose computer the curiosity was satisfied on, and it was his e-mail address that was captured. So yesterday, he put this on his Facebook…

Since he’s not on the paid list, it’s probably not too much of a political crisis for him, but one imagines his opponents in the District 66 race will try to make hay out of the disclosure.

Dore’s name has generated a little more interest, since he’s on the paid list. But the Louisiana Republican Party executive director has an explanation – namely, that his law firm does opposition research, and he subscribed to Ashley Madison in hopes of getting dirt on Democrats.

Which, despite the way some of the media presented it, is perfectly plausible. That’s the kind of thing oppo researchers do.

And it’s why nobody should have been too surprised when renowned Louisiana political consultant George Kennedy’s name was on the list. Kennedy’s firm has also been known to do oppo research.

Apparently Ashley Madison isn’t all that good a resource for that kind of thing, and Dore’ isn’t much of a happy camper right now for having to explain himself after not actually getting the goods on anybody.

And the truth is, there isn’t much to get. You can come up with quite a bit more dirt on some of the state’s pro and college athletes with the Ashley Madison list than you can its politicos. Having reviewed the list we saw a number of people associated with LSU football and baseball, for example, but only two current or former political figures. Apparently we either have a lot more moral political class in this state than we expected, or they’re just a whole lot smarter about getting away with their immorality.

The two names of political interest, which so far we haven’t actually seen reported anywhere else, are former Democrat state representative and current state rep candidate Damon Baldone, who has already made an ass of himself this month by suing, unsuccessfully, to have the registrar allow him to put both a “D” and an “R” by his name. Baldone’s efforts at becoming a political hermaphrodite weren’t successful; who knows whether his attempts at getting some online strange went any better. Anybody who votes for Baldone this fall needs his or her head examined.

The other is a Republican. Kevin Couhig is the parish president in West Feliciana, who ran on a reform agenda a couple of years ago and won. Couhig is a venture capitalist in Baton Rouge in his day job; seems he’s got lots of free time to kill. He might have more when former state rep Tom McVea, whom Couhig narrowly defeated for the West Feliciana parish president seat in 2013, decides to go back after him with some fresh ammunition in two years.

Looking at the list, though, while the people on it might be largely guilty of mischievous intent it’s unlikely any of them actually had an affair with somebody they met on Ashley Madison. We can say this because a good 95 percent of the names on the list are men. Now, it’s possible – probably even likely – that some of those men’s names are actually women using their husbands’ credit cards; if you think about it that’s actually a pretty smart move if you’re going to be a cheater.

Still, the site is very much a sausage party. And for prospective cheaters, it’s pretty clearly a ripoff. Which might be a blessing in disguise to an extent.

On the other hand, there is someone on the Louisiana list from the Lake Charles area who actually spent $9,400 on his Ashley Madison account. The level of stupidity inherent in that is breathtaking, though it does beg the question…what the hell are you getting at Ashley Madison for $9,400?

 Speaking of people who need to be outed for bad behavior, how about the House Democrats who are clamoring for an investigation of the Center for Medical Progress? Naturally, they’re led by Elijah Cummings, whose scumbaggery and partisanship knows no bounds.

Those Planned Parenthood videos show a level of criminal behavior and ethical disaster almost unimaginable in a decent society, and the Democrat hacks in the House want to punish the whistleblowers. Matt Walsh has it exactly right – if you side with Planned Parenthood here you cannot call yourself a decent human being.

 

Speaking of Planned Parenthood and the fetal tissue bazaar they’re running, Louisiana Right To Life has billboards like this one going up around the state. The messaging here is brilliant…

 

There’s a great piece by Kurt Schlichter at IJ Review about immigration offering five pieces of advice to the Republican establishment on the issue if they want to actually get the support of the party’s base voters. Number 4 on the list is especially interesting…

Number Four: Send illegals home by enforcing hiring practices through civil law.

Let’s unleash the power of trial lawyers by granting individual American citizens the right to sue employers who hire illegal aliens under a federal unfair competition law. A lot of people rightly worry about a government police state intruding into private business. So let’s grant our workers the right to sue employers who hire illegals for damages for displacing American citizens from American jobs, and let the attorneys do their thing. And when the illegal aliens’ jobs dry up – because they will overnight – then the illegals will…wait for it…self-deport. Finally, a way to use lawyers for good instead of evil.

The courts would be full, but only for a while. And something tells us private plaintiff attorneys would do a whole lot more effective job of rooting illegals out of the workplace than federal bureaucrats would.

 

Hey, how about that Rosie O’Donnell, huh? Parent Of The Year.

At least the kid’s back home, though it seems like that might have been part of the problem in the first place.

 

Is there any reason why the goldbricking losers who advised Mitt Romney on how to blow an almost unlosable campaign three years ago are now full of advice for Donald Trump on how he’s screwing everything up? Shaddap, already. You guys all got your paychecks for fleecing Romney – nobody cares about your opinion. Go run a county commission race somewhere.