…and I’m going to offer up a few words on those by way of clarification, and doing a bit of housekeeping on a Monday.

We haven’t endorsed Vitter’s gubernatorial campaign. It’s far too early for us to do that. Jay Dardenne and Scott Angelle are also Republican candidates for governor, and we want to hear what they have to say. Our typical practice is to wait to see which Republican is in the runoff before professing support for any of them, though we often have to depart from that practice when one of the GOP candidates makes himself or herself unelectable or unsupportable. To date, that hasn’t happened in the governor’s race and until it does we’re going to stay neutral and objective.

We’ve said all along that there is editorial space here at the Hayride, and advertising space, and we do what we can to keep them separate. That said, we don’t support left-wing causes here at the Hayride, for several reasons – the most important of which being that to do so and to present those causes to our readers would tend to piss you off, and we try to keep the pissing-off of our readers to a relative minimum – and therefore you won’t see anything expressly Democratic in nature unless it’s coming from an ad network. We don’t have much control over what the ad networks serve to our readers on our site.

A few weeks back, Robert Reed – he’s the younger partner in the mother-son duo who foisted the Steve Scalise “scandal” on us – was on Facebook trying to organize a boycott of the Hayride’s advertisers, and made a list of 15-20 companies who needed to be boycotted.

Not a single one of those companies actually advertise on the Hayride. They advertise with one of the three ad networks we work through, and in fact it was likely Robert Reed’s browsing history which brought him ads from those companies. If you’re at L.L. Bean’s website looking for a pair of hiking boots on a Tuesday, for example, don’t be surprised if there are ads for L.L. Bean hiking boots on the sidebar when you’re looking at the Hayride on Wednesday.

This is the level of intellect we’re dealing with, but for the edification of the rest of our readers – Vitter is an advertiser on our site, and he won’t be the only candidate in the 2015 elections who’ll be doing that. Buddy Amoroso, who’s running in the special election for state representative in District 66, is also on the site as an advertiser now, and while we haven’t endorsed him to date we do like him just like we’re fond of Vitter. But that fondness does not mean we’re trying to get you to vote for him.

What those Vitter ads really signify, though, is that some of the wishful rumor-mongering you might have heard to the effect that Vitter wasn’t really in the 2015 gubernatorial race and that he was going to get out and keep his job in the Senate…it doesn’t look like any of that stuff rings true. Vitter’s ad contract with us runs through election day. He’s in.