Friday Night Lightning Round

Blogging on a Friday night. Man, things have changed:

• As expected, Tom Emmer has now won the Republican Party endorsement for governor, besting Marty Seifert. Seifert conceded after the second ballot showed Emmer within striking distance of the win. As readers of this feature know, I preferred Emmer to Seifert because I think that he will do a better job of explaining the conservative vision to the citizenry of this state. Having said that, I wish Marty Seifert well -- he has served with great distinction in the legislature for 14 years now. I'm not sure what his next move will be, but he's a few years shy of 40 and has plenty of time to figure that out. If you want to know more, Mitch Berg and Kevin Ecker both did a great job of live-blogging the convention and have a lot of information at the respective links.
• While we do a lot of Obama-bashing around here, I do try to be fair. And simply stated, I don't think it's fair at all to blame the President for the oil spill damage that seems to be headed for the Gulf Coast. John Hinderaker at Powerline has a different view. I hated the horrible demagoguery involved in placing the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in George W. Bush's lap and therefore I won't be a part of trying to do the same thing to W's successor. And that's all I have to say about that.
• Megan McArdle of the Atlantic Monthly has been following the situation in Greece pretty closely and she reports that things are getting even worse. This is a huge issue because the financial collapse that is happening in Athens will likely happen in Lisbon, too, and perhaps even in Dublin and Rome. It's not clear that the EU is going to bail the Greeks out and the implications for the world could be quite ominous.
• I think the Benster's baseball team has a chance to be pretty good this year. We'll talk more about that soon.