Republican Gov. Charlie Crist is suggesting lawmakers approve a $22.7 billion education budget this year. The budget would be an increase of $535.5 million, or about 2.6 percent per student, from this year. Crist unveiled the recommendation during a visit to a St. Peterburg elementary school today.

The budget recommendations come months after the state was sued by advocacy groups claiming Florida has violated a state constitutional amendment requiring that its children be provided a “high-quality” education. The suits contend the state isn’t spending enough money on public schools. It cites low graduation rates as well as Florida’s low rankings in education spending and teacher pay.

Details from Crist’s press release after the jump.

(more…)

Republican congressional challenger Allen West’s campaign says it raised an impressive $670,000 in the fourth quarter of 2009 for West’s bid to unseat Democratic U.S. Rep. Ron Klein. This video, posted in October and viewed more than 1.8 million times, helped West raise more in those three months than he did for his entire 2008 campaign.

Read about in this week’s Politics column.

Former Broward County Mayor Ben Graber reacted to our story today about Sen. Ted Deutch’s attendance record by calling on the Boca Raton Democrat to resign from his state office. Graber and Deutch are rivals in the Democratic U.S. House primary election set for Feb. 2.

“Mr. Deutch cannot continue to hold his Senate seat in reserve while he tries to get a promotion,” Graber said in the statement. “It is unfair to everyone, except Mr. Deutch. It’s obvious that he cannot handle both jobs at the same time.”

Continue reading for the full press release.

(more…)

SENATE:

16: Ted Deutch, D-Boca Raton; 13: Larcenia Bullard, D-Miami; 10: Rudy Garcia, R-Miami; 9: Charlie Justice, D-St. Petersburg; 7: Charlie Dean, R-Inverness; 6: Al Lawson, D-Tallahassee; 5: Alex Diaz de la Portilla, R-Miami, Frederica Wilson, D-Miami.

HOUSE:

9: J.C. Planas, R-Miami; 6: Doug Holder, R-Sarasota, Eddy Gonzalez, R-Miami, Geraldine Thompson, D-Orlando, Juan Zapata, R-Miami; 5: Yolly Roberson, D-Miami.

STORY HERE.

Rev. Ed Bieluch, the former Palm Beach County sheriff who was later ordained as a priest in the Anglican Catholic Church, is applying for a seat on the new county ethics commission.

The five-member commission is to include one seat for a former elected official to be named by the Palm Beach County League of Cities. The league is accepting applications through 5 p.m. Monday and plans to choose a candidate Wednesday.

Six other former elected officials are also applying.

UPDATE: Florida Democratic Party spokesman Eric Jotkoff: “A 20-year congressman and Washington lobbyist will do nothing – absolutely nothing – to change Florida’s economy for the better. We’ve tried leaving it to career politicians like Bill McCollum to turn Florida’s economy around, and they’ve driven it into a ditch -11.8 percent unemployment.”

Matt Williams, Bill McCollum’s gubernatorial campaign manager, sent this memo to supporters today.

Ignoring that Republicans have controlled state government since 1998, Williams cites Scott Brown’s improbable Republican victory in Massachusetts as proof that soaring unemployment can be pinned on Democrats. He also notes that anxiety in Florida over President Obama’s health care reform is a major opportunity for the GOP.

From the memo:
(more…)

The latest Federal Election Commission reports show a financial mismatch in the special election campaign for Robert Wexler’s old congressional District 19 seat.

Democratic state Sen. Ted Deutch has piled up nearly $1 million in campaign contributions for the race and spent $684,578 while his rival in the Feb. 2 Democratic primary, Ben Graber, says he has raised and spent around $100,000.

In the GOP primary, contractor Ed Lynch reports that he has raised $59,277, including $19,500 of his own money, and spent $50,175. But Lynch’s report says he has $84,455 in cash on hand because of money carried over from his losing 2008 campaign.

Republican candidate Joe Budd raised $23,142, including $10,000 of his own money. A third GOP candidate, Curt Price, raised $2,411 from contributors and kicked in $53,500 of his own money.

(more…)

Republican Adam Putnam announced 27 of 76 state House Republicans are backing him in his primary bid against state Sen. Carey Baker for the party’s agriculture commissioner nomination.

For the full list, which includes Dean Cannon & Will Weatherford — the chamber’s next two Republican leaders, continue reading..

(more…)

The White House announced Thursday that President Obama will travel to the Tampa-St. Petersburg area on Thursday, the day after his first State of the Union speech.

One person who probably won’t be in the audience: Republican Gov. Charlie Crist, who has been under fire for supporting Obama’s stimulus package.

“Right now there is not any plan for him to be with the president,” Crist spokesman Sterling Ivey said.

(Meanwhile, the Crist campaign sent out this press release today saying that Obama has done nothing to help the state’s 11.8 percent unemployment rate.)

Crist is planning a road show over the next two weeks to roll out his state budget proposal. The tentative plan includes an education budget press conference in his hometown St. Petersburg on Monday and a full budget roll out in Tallahassee on Friday.

The following week, he’ll be on the road Tuesday and Thursday to highlight budget proposals, including his ideas for economic development. On Wednesday, Crist is in Tallahassee for an annual Associated Press editors meeting.

A bitterly divided U.S. Supreme Court decision allowing corporations and unions to spend unlimited amounts of money on campaigns right up until the day of the election and upsetting more than 60 years of restrictions will radicalize elections, critics of the opinion say.

“It’s going to be the Wild Wild West,” said Ben Ginsberg, a Republican attorney who has represented several GOP presidential campaigns. “If corporations and unions can give unlimited amounts … it means that the public debate is significantly changed with a lot more voices, and it means that the loudest voices are going to be corporations and unions.”

Read the story here.

The bill (HB 315) would bar adoption agencies from making potential parents reveal whether they have guns or ammunition in their home. It passed its first hurdle, the Florida House Health & Family Services Policy Council, on a 15-0 vote.

From The News Service of Florida:

The only significant challenge came from Rep. Kelly Skidmore, D-Boca Raton, who said she didn’t agree with Horner’s view about the motives behind the agency’s questions.

“I do object to the assumption that the question was asked for nefarious reasons,” Skidmore said. “The question was asked … to make sure that children would be safe in an environment they’d never been before and where people had not had children before, (not) to document people and register weapons.”

Sen. Thad Altman, R-Viera, is sponsoring the Senate version (SB 530).

GOP congressional hopeful Curt Price, one of three candidates in the Feb. 2 Republican primary for the congressional District 19 seat, will begin airing his first TV spot on cable Friday, his campaign says.

With Price, Joe Budd and Ed Lynch all running on conservative platforms, Price highlights his biography as “son of a shoe salesman,” former cop and small business owner who has “lived the American dream” and who pledges to vote against any bill that expands government.

Check out some of the other District 19 candidate ads here and here.

It’s the second endorsement from a Jeb Bush progeny for Republican U.S. Senate candidate Marco Rubio.

Here’s the first. Continue reading for the latest.

(more…)

Democratic congressional hopeful Ben Graber, who faces state Sen. Ted Deutch in a special Feb. 2 primary for the former seat of former U.S. Rep. Robert Wexler, says he’ll remove figures from his campaign Web site and Facebook page that suggest there’s an Associated Press “poll” that shows him getting 54 percent of the vote.

The AP says Graber came across purely fictitious numbers that AP sent to its newspaper, radio and TV clients this week as a pre-election test to make sure their computer systems are prepared to handle returns.

(more…)

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled today that corporations and unions can spend as much as they want on “electioneering communications,” the negative ads targeting candidates.

The ruling could have a sweeping effect on Florida campaigns, especially in battleground races like the U.S. Senate GOP primary between Gov. Charlie Crist and former House Speaker Marco Rubio.

The suit was filed by a group behind Hillary Clinton-bashing ads in her U.S. Senate campaign.

The court decided in Citizens United v. the Federal Election Commission that banning corporations and unions from paying for the ads equates to a chilling effect on free speech.

“There is no basis for the proposition that, in the political speech context, the government may impose restrictions on certain disfavored speakers. Both history and logic lead to this conclusion,” the ruling reads. “Political speech is so ingrained in this country’s culture that speakers find ways around campaign finance laws. Rapid changes in technology—and the creative dynamic inherent in the concept of free expression—counsel against upholding a law that restricts political speech in certain media or by certain speakers.”

Common Cause said the ruling “creates political crisis” by paving the way for corporations and unions to spend unlimited amounts of cash on elections.

“The Roberts court today made a bad situation worse,” Common Cause President Bob Edgar said in a press release. “This decision allows Wall Street to tap its vast corporate profits to drown out the voice of the public in our democracy. “The path from here is clear: Congress must free itself from Wall Street’s grip so Main Street can finally get a fair shake.We need to change the way America pays for elections. Passing the Fair Elections Now Act would give us the best Congress money can’t buy.”

No word on whether the Republican Senator-elect will come to Florida and campaign for either Rubio or Gov. Charlie Crist in Florida’s GOP U.S. Senate primary. But Rubio supporters are hoping to tap into the momentum from the Massachusetts phenomenon.

Citing Brown’s historic victory on Tuesday, U.S. Sen. Jim DeMint sent a fund-raising letter to supporters today asking to help raise $100k for Rubio by Feb. 10. (The date is an anniversary of sorts.)

“Conservatives across the country recently supported a moneybomb for Senator-elect Scott Brown, which raised $1.3 million for his campaign in just 24 hours. If we can raise just a fraction of that amount for Marco Rubio’s campaign, it will give him the momentum and resources he needs to win,” wrote DeMint, R-S.C.

Republicans aren’t the only one trying to raise money in Brown’s wake. Democratic U.S. House candidate Ted Deutch of Boca Raton penned a similar plea on Wednesday.

First, the good news: Florida’s economic woes have hit bottom, the legislature’s chief economist Amy Baker told the Senate yesterday.

Now, the bad news: The state’s unemployment rate is expected to climb to 12 percent as early as Friday when the most recent job numbers are released, Baker said.

And more bad news for lawmakers as they struggle to craft a budget with up to $3.3 billion – about 4 percent – less than they had for this year’s $66.5 billion spending plan.

Although the national recession is over, Florida’s not going to show an economic recovery for at least another year, Baker and University of Florida economist David Denslow told the Ways and Means Committee, which about 30 of the 40-member chamber attended after Senate President Jeff Atwater asked them to sit in.

“We think we’ve hit bottom and we’re going to hover around the bottom for a wile before we start picking up,” Baker said.

The economy will start picking up next spring, she said, but even with normal growth rates, the recovery is coming off a very low base level so the turn-around will be very slow.

It will be three years “before you’re going to be out of the hole on a lot of measures,” Baker said.

Read the story here.

On the other side of the fourth floor rotunda, House Democrats wrote a letter to GOP leaders saying they don’t like their approach in determining what the state’s critical needs are.

They want to look not only at expenditures but at revenues as well. (Translation: higher taxes?)

But that’s not likely to happen on the Senate side.

Atwater, R-North Palm Beach, told his members yesterday he “won’t extract another dollar” from Floridians.

That’s about how it went Wednesday among candidates for Florida’s open U.S. Senate seat as each scrambled to point out parallels between his campaign and that of Brown, whose victory Tuesday gave Republicans a Senate seat in Massachusetts for the first time since 1972.

“You’d think these guys were best friends with Scott Brown,” said Wayne Bertsch, whose Tallahassee-based phone bank company dialed 300,000 Massachusetts voters in the final days of the Senate race.

Rest here.

Will Massachusetts Republican superstar Scott Brown help South Florida Democratic congressional hopeful Ted Deutch raise money?

State Sen. Deutch of Boca Raton, heavily favored in a special election to replace Democrat Robert Wexler in Congress, says Brown’s victory in Tuesday’s Massachusetts Senate special election proves he can’t take anything for granted, even in an overwhelmingly Democratic congressional district.

In a fund-raising e-mail titled “Wake Up Call,” Deutch notes that Massachusetts has “a similar electorate to my congressional district” and “based on the results out of Massachusetts, I must work to introduce myself and my commitment to the community to an even wider spectrum of voters. To achieve this result, I must again ask for your help….”

Read Deutch’s entire fund-raising e-mail after the jump….

(more…)

Kendick Meek‘s Senate campaign today flatly rejected our question about whether they might have second thoughts about stumping with President Obama after his efforts in the Massachusetts Senate race came up short.

Meanwhile, Meek’s camp suggested the possibility that Meek could be cast in the Scott Brown role if the same scenario plays out in Florida. The logic: Brown was laying much his groundwork while Mass. Dems were locked in a divisive primary. In Florida’s Senate race, that bloodshed is on the Republican side of the campaign.

“We saw last night that there is a strong national mood for change across the country,” said Meek campaign manager Abe Dyk. “Having worked as a skycap for tips, as a Florida State Trooper and having led the Coalition to Reduce Class Size, Kendrick Meek is the candidate best positioned to deliver that change as a U.S. Senator.”