Despite a trend of anti-establishment activism running through conservative politics, Florida Republicans on Saturday selected a Tallahassee insider to lead the party into a critical election year.

State Sen. John Thrasher, a former lobbyist and state House speaker, defeated two opponents in an extraordinary special election called after former Chairman Jim Greer was forced to resign over accusations of excessive spending of party money and improperly influencing primary races.

The election is expected to have repercussions in the state Senate, where Thrasher is chairman of the Ethics & Elections Committee and one of 40 members hoping to turn around the state’s escalating unemployment and spiraling foreclosure crisis.

Thrasher said he would step down from the elections committee position, an offer Senate President Jeff Atwater, R-North Palm Beach, indicated he would accept. But Atwater insisted Thrasher could simultaneously focus on another year of state budget problems — his duty as a state lawmaker — and rapidly rebuilding a party that, until recently, had been the envy of Republicans nationwide.

Story here.

WASHINGTON — Republican congressional hopeful Ed Lynch might not be known by most of the attendees at the Conservative Political Action Conference.

But “fire-breathing liberal” Robert Wexler is.

So Lynch, running in an April 13 special election to replace Wexler, was warmly received by thousands of conservatives this afternoon.

“He is a candidate for the next House election that’s going to occur…It’s the seat vacated by that loudmouth Robert Wexler in Florida that you might remember from cable television,” said Wall Street Journal columnist John Fund in his introduction of Lynch.

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The vote was just announced at the Republican Party of Florida executive committee in Orlando.

Thrasher got 135 votes; Broward County’s Sharon Day, 85; Mark Cross, 2; two votes were invalidated.

Thrasher, a St. Augustine Republican who is chairman of the Senate Ethics & Elections Committee, promised to raise $1 million during the six-week campaign to replace ousted Chairman Jim Greer.

Today, Thrasher also set up his two targets for the next year.

“Our enemy is the liberal media. And the Democrats,” Thrasher told the committee. “That is where we will begin to refocus our efforts.”

Day, his main competition, had promised to get “down in the trenches” with party activists this year.

“We will get it done,” she said. “We will earn back that faith. we will earn back that trust.”

Developing… (My Twitter notes here.)

Voting is underway at the state party’s executive committee meeting in Orlando.

For a recap of the stump speeches this morning and last night from the three candidates — John Thrasher, Sharon Day and Mark Cross — click my Twitter feed here.

WASHINGTON — Actor Stephen Baldwin, a.k.a. the conservative Baldwin brother, just dropped by a fund-raiser/meet-and-greet for South Florida Republican congressional hopeful Allen West at the Conservative Political Action Conference here.

West’s improved money-raising has drawn the notice of the national GOP as he tries to unseat Democratic U.S. Rep. Ron Klein. West should raise his profile even more on Saturday afternoon, when he has a featured speaking slot shortly before conservative multi-media star Glenn Beck speaks.

This morning, West got several standing ovations when he was part of a panel discussion called “Jihad: The Political Third Rail,” in which he said America needs to confront the ideology behind Islamic terrorism.

“There’s no such thing as a war on terror….A nation goes to war against an ideology, and that’s what we’ve been talking about today.

“We’ve been talking about the fact that here is something that is a totalitarian, theocratic, political ideology and it is called Islam. This is not about Muslims. It is just the same as in Nazi Germany. Not every German was a Nazi. It’s just the same as when I was in Iraq in 2003. Not every Iraqi was a member of the Baath Party,” said West, a retired U.S. Army lieutenant colonel.

Once I had a love and it was a gas

Soon turned out to be a pain in the ass

Those are the lyrics from the album version of Blondie’s 1979 chart topper, “Heart of Glass.”

On Saturday, Republicans will be able to live the lyrics in the morning and party to them at night.

Florida Republican brass have a special meeting in the morning to replace ousted Chairman Jim Greer. Greer was forced out over concerns about party spending and what many felt was his inappropriate influence in primary races.

Of course, the story doesn’t end there with Republican struggles: They have a contested race to replace Greer, hand-wringing over a secret contract that paid the party’s executive director $400,000 and new questions over whether Senate President Jeff Atwater, former House Speaker Marco Rubio and others should release their party credit card statements.

Sounds like a party, right?

Actually, the party is later in the day when the GOP state Senate caucus host the “Universal Orlando Mardi Gras Celebration” to raise money for the party. The tentative schedule calls for an afternoon tour of Disney, a dinner reception and an 8:30 p.m. “VIP viewing” of Blondie in concert.

While former House Speaker Ray Sansom gets grilled on Monday over accusations that he wielded his influence in many improper ways, current House Republican leaders will be strolling the Bermuda grass of the Palmer Legends Country Club in The Villages.

House Speaker Larry Cretul and designated future speakers Dean Cannon and Will Weatherford are hosting a Republican fundraiser at the Arnold Palmer-designed course on Monday and Tuesday.

UPDATED: Rubio’s camp responds:

“After eight months of waiting, Marco Rubio is pleased Charlie Crist has finally accepted our long-standing invitation to have a real debate on the issues affecting Florida’s and our nation’s future,” said Rubio for Senate spokesman Alex Burgos.  “For nearly a year, Charlie Crist has avoided a serious policy debate or an honest discussion of his record. Instead, he has relied on the broken politics of shrill name-calling, cynical reinvention and petty attacks.“Only now, when his campaign is increasingly desperate and willing to say and do anything to turn the tide, has he apparently realized the importance of a substantive debate on the issues.“FOX Network has shown serious interest in this primary campaign since day one and was the first national news organization to extend an invitation for a debate. Marco Rubio gladly accepted immediately and will be happy to debate Charlie Crist on Meet the Press or anywhere else after he has kept his commitment to have the first debate on FOX on March 28.  No national news organization has shown greater interest in covering this race than FOX.  It’s unfortunate that Charlie Crist doesn’t understand this.”

Republican Gov. Charlie Crist‘s campaign announced he would participate in two U.S. Senate Republican debates in March. Fellow GOP candidate Marco Rubio has already agreed to one. From the Crist campaign:

The Charlie Crist for U.S. Senate campaign today announced that Gov. Crist has agreed to participate in campaign debates hosted by Meet The Press on March 7th, 2010 and Fox News Sunday on March 28th, 2010.

“Governor Crist looks forward to participating in an open and honest discussion with Speaker Rubio about issues that directly affect Florida voters,” said Communications Director Andrea Saul. “These debates will give Floridians the chance to learn more about the candidates’ actual records, and to see for themselves that Governor Crist is the clear choice when it comes to sending a Senator to Washington who will stand behind the principles of less government, less taxes, and more personal freedom.”

Gov. Charlie Crist for the second time ordered David Eugene Johnston to be put to death by lethal injection, decades after the Death Row inmate convicted of killing an elderly woman was first ordered to be executed.

Crist first ordered Johnston, now 49, to be put to death last year in April but the Florida Supreme Court stayed the execution until DNA tests could be done. Johnston has spent nearly 25 years on Death Row and is scheduled to be executed by lethal injection on March 9 at 6 p.m. at Florida State Prison in Starke.

Gov. Bob Martinez signed Johnston’s first death warrant in 1988 after he was sentenced to die for killing 84-year-old Mary Hammond in Orlando.

Johnston appealed that order on a variety of issues, including a claim that he is severely mentally ill.

The DNA tests taken from Hammond’s fingernail clippings could not exclude Johnston as a contributor of the DNA.

The high court ruled last month that the new evidence, including the DNA test results, would not have exonerated him and denied his request for a new trial. And the court ruled that, while Johnston may be mentally ill, he is not mentally retarded and thus can still be executed.

U.S. Sen. Bill Nelson criticized President Obama on Thursday for being too “aloof” and not fighting hard enough to pass health care legislation before offering his own prescription.

“It’s my hope that the President is going to get engaged,” Nelson, D-Fla., said Thursday. “He’s been aloof. If we’re going to pass health care he’s got to get in there with a bull whip and brass knuckles.”

Nelson was in West Palm Beach to speak at a luncheon hosted by the Forum Club of the Palm Beaches at the Kravis Center. In comments before and during the lunch, he railed against the “excessive partisanship” and “ideological rigidity” that was jamming up Congress and frustrating voters.

Taking questions from the audience, Nelson offered his own solution. He conceded that the so-called public option would not get the necessary 60 votes in the Senate. Instead, he endorsed creating a “nationwide insurance plan,” as outlined in the Senate version of a health care bill to offer coverage to those who aren’t already covered by their employer. The program, he said, would be similar to the plan now offered to federal employees and would be overseen by the U.S. Office of Personnel Management. The plan would compete against private insurers, offering coverage through a state insurance marketplace

WASHINGTON — Marco Rubio is here to speak to the annual Conservative Political Action Conference this morning.

And he’s hoping to return to Washington in January as a Republican U.S. Senator.

But Rubio, who has pulled ahead of GOP primary rival Charlie Crist in the polls, will pledge in his speech to thousands of conservative activists that he’ll come to Washington to combat big government and “not be co-opted by it.”

A few advance excerpts of Rubio’s speech after the jump…..

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Haiti’s ambassador to the United States got a surprise before giving a speech to the legislative black caucus this evening: $23,400 for earthquake relief.

Ambassador Raymond Alcide Joseph said he expected a free trip to Tallahassee and a free lunch but had no idea that he’d be going home with a fistful of checks.

“I’m at a loss for words,” Joseph told the audience gathered in the House chambers before giving a speech celebrating Black History Month. Two Democratic white lawmakers, Reps. Ron Saunders of Key West and Richard Steinberg of Miami Beach, also attended.

The donations included $5,000 from Hispanic lawmakers; $4,000 from a view-a-thon held by state Rep. Alan Williams, D-Tallahassee, and others; and $5,000 from the Florida Conference of Black State Legislators, the first of many the black caucus said are yet to come.

“I can tell you, this warms my heart,” Joseph said.

Sen. Tony Hill, D-Jacksonville, organized the fundraiser for Joseph, a journalist who founded a Haitian newspaper.

The money will go into into a bank account opened by the Haitian embassy because so many people wanted to contribute to relief efforts but were leery of giving to some of the organizations collecting the funds, Joseph said.

WASHINGTON — Gov. Charlie Crist’s U.S. Senate campaign is mocking GOP rival Marco Rubio’s claims of conservative outsider status on the eve of Rubio’s address to the influential Conservative Political Action Conference here.

Rubio is slated to speak at 10 a.m. Thursday at the annual Who’s Who national gathering of conservatives. He’s also expected to attend a few fund-raising events while he’s in town, including one with GOP stars Mary Matalin and Liz Cheney and former U.S. Reps. J.C. Watts and Vin Weber.

CPAC Director Lisa DePasquale said Rubio was invited to speak because of interest from CPAC sponsors.

What about Crist?

“Charlie Crist’s name did not come up” when speakers were being considered for the conservative confab, DePasquale said.

Haiti’s ambassador to the United States Raymond Alcide Joseph made an impassioned plea for help from the U.S. government at a press conference with black legislators in the Capitol today.

“We need tents. Tents to house the people because there are more than a million of them displaced. Right now they have make-shift tents with sheets and things like that. But unless we have those tents within the next six to eight weeks we’ll be in deep trouble because that’s when the rainy season starts,” Joseph said at a press conference in the office of Sen. Gary Siplin, head of the legislature’s black caucus. “So I am asking, I cannot plead too much, please help us get as many tents as possible.”

More than 1 million Haitians have been displaced by the devastating earthquake that razed the island nation’s capital Port-au-Prince last month, leaving more than 200,000 dead and as many injured.

Venezuela has sent 30,000 tents and an unnamed Caribbean nation has pledged another 10,000, Joseph said. But that’s far fewer than the 200,000 Haitian President Rene Preval is pleading for before the onset of the rainy season.

Joseph described his visit to Port-au-Prince Friday with U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and other congressional leaders.

“I’m not a very emotional person, but I cried. I had cried before, in private. But this time I cried in public. The devastation cannot be explained,” the soft-spoken founder of a Haitian independent newspaper, now run by his brother, Joseph said.

Joseph also asked the U.S. and Canada to make it easier for Haitian Americans living in those countries to return to Haiti to help with the nation’s recovery.

“We have a wealth of resources of Haitian Americans in this country and in Canada who want to give some of their time, some of their expertise to Haiti. But so far their getting there has been stymied,” Joseph said.

The first wave of volunteers assisted the military rescue efforts, Joseph said.

More than 83 percent of Haitian-born professionals have left the country, most of the living now in the United States, Canada and France.

Joseph said those workers need – and want – to return to their native land to help with recovery.

Joseph will address lawmakers at 5 p.m. today as part of the legislative black caucus’ Black History Month celebration.

He said he came to Florida as a reminder of President Barack Obama’s pledge that the United States would be with Haiti for the long haul.

“This is part of why I’m here. For the long haul. I want the story to continue. Because rebuilding Haiti is not going to be one week, two months, a year. It’s going to take quite a few years and I want you to be with us. That’s why I’m here,” Joseph said.

UPDATED: Story reflects version published in the Feb. 18 print edition of The Palm Beach Post.

Locally affected special districts:

South Florida Water Management District
Health Care District of Palm Beach County
Children’s Services Council of Palm Beach County
Children’s Services Council of Martin County
St. Lucie County Fire District
Source: Florida Community Affairs Department

TALLAHASSEE — The power to raise property taxes would rest solely with elected officials under a constitutional amendment proposed for the November ballot.

The amendment would revamp the supervision of hospital and children’s services districts across the state and make the South Florida Water Management District, which covers 16 counties and includes about 7 million people, the biggest voting district in the state and among the largest in the country, according to the National Association of Election Officials.

“It’s something called ‘no taxation without representation,” said state Rep. Carl Domino, a Jupiter Republican sponsoring the amendment (HJR 493) discussed Wednesday in the House Governmental Affairs Committee.

Objections were raised Wednesday by the special district officials who argued the districts were created — in most cases voter-approved — specifically to avoid electoral politics.

“You will change fundamentally how these water management districts operate,” Audubon of Florida’s Eric Draper told the committee.

Draper reminded the House panel that another Palm Beach County lawmaker, former Senate President Phil Lewis, D-Riviera Beach, led an “extraordinarily thoughtful legislative process” that asked voters to approve water districts along hydrological lines instead of political boundaries.

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Attorney General Bill McCollum said today that the state will not join a federal whistleblower lawsuit against a PVC pipe manufacturer accused of selling millions of dollars of faulty water and sewer lines to local governments on projects around the country.

McCollum said his office agreed with the U.S. Justice Department that the case is without merit.

“After we looked at it, we concluded the same thing. So we chose not to join in this one,” McCollum, who is running in a GOP primary against Sen. Paula Dockery for governor, said.

McCollum has a team of lawyers looking into about 150 whistleblower – or qui tam – lawsuits at any given time, he said.

McCollum said his office will announce its involvement in a similar case within a few days “but not this one.”

State Sen. Dan Gelber, a Miami Beach Democrat running to replace McCollum, asked the attorney general yesterday to join four other states and dozens of cities, counties and water districts in the whistleblower suit filed in federal court in California.

Gelber bristled at McCollum’s reason for not joining the suit.

“That’s perplexing to me. Is the AG’s position that Florida won’t initiate an action unless the federal government does? I can’t believe that that is their position because that defeats the purpose of having your own attorney general who can vindicate the rights of your citizens,” Gelber said. “You must have got his quote wrong because no attorney general would cede the right of their citizens in that manner.”

A former employee of the company alleges that the pipes, used for sewer and water lines and supposed to last up to 50 years, leak and break as quickly as the first year of use and can rupture and explode.

Court documents show that Florida was among the governments initially involved in the lawsuit in 2006.

The allegedly faulty pipe was used in a Ft. Pierce project in 2003.

Lawyers for the plaintiffs claim that it will cost millions of dollars for local governments to dig up and replace the faulty sewer and water lines at a time when they can least afford it.

Martin Edward Grossman on Tuesday was the fifth execution since Republican Gov. Charlie Crist reinstated the death penalty in July 2008.

But on the final day of his life, nearly 50,000 calls and e-mails flooded Crist’s office pleading for him to halt the execution, a spokesman said. Many of the calls came from New York, where Jewish leaders organized a petition campaign to save Grossman’s life.

The Gainesville Sun explores some of the issues raised by petitioners.

Meanwhile, here is the Associated Press account of the execution.

There’s a report from the Fort Myers CBS affiliate WINK about a curious exchange last night between former President George W. Bush and former Gov. Jeb Bush. The Naples and Fort Myers newspapers don’t mention this exchange and the CBS reporter notes that the Bush’s didn’t allow cameras in the town hall event.

…the Bush brothers disagreed on the Senate race between Marco Rubio and Charlie Crist. Jeb Bush says he is officially neutral, but is disappointed in Crist’s embrace of the stimulus bill. George W. Bush joked “who the hell is Marco Rubio”…

From columnist Frank Cerabino:

Charlie Crist came up with a grass-roots approach to tourism. Forget all those high-priced magazine ads and TV spots. They cost money.

Instead, we could save a bundle in advertising if we Florida residents all become individual tourism ambassadors by asking the out-of-state people we know to visit here.

It’s like enlisting every Floridian to write their own chain letter, except there’s no Nigerian banker involved and we don’t need your financial account numbers in advance.

After more than four years, Florida Attorney General Bill McCollum remains on the fence about whether to go after potentially millions of dollars from the manufacturers of faulty water and sewer pipes, a state senator who wants McCollum’s job charges.

Sen. Dan Gelber, a Democrat running for attorney general in a primary against Sen. Dave Aronberg of Greenacres, asked McCollum to join other state attorneys general in a whistleblower lawsuit that Florida was initially involved in.

But McCollum, a Republican running for governor, has not officially joined at least four other states and numerous towns, cities and counties that are moving forward with the lawsuit against Los Angeles-based JM Eagle and its former parent company, makers of the PVC pipe.

A former employee of the company alleges that the pipes, used for sewer and water lines and supposed to last up to 50 years, leak and break as quickly as the first year of use and can rupture and explode.

Delaware, Nevada, Tennessee, Virginia and at least 40 California water districts have joined the whistleblower lawsuit filed in federal court in California seeking millions of dollars in damages. Court documents show that Florida was among the governments initially involved in the lawsuit in 2006.

“These are not allegations that should be sat on,” Gelber, D-Miami Beach, said. “If something improper happened, people have a right to know and seek a remedy and it’s the attorney general’s obligation to make a decision ASAP. If there is a righteous cause of action for consumers, the last thing we want to be is late to the battle.”

Read Gelber’s letter to McCollum here.