The Florida Senate said goodbye to President Jeff Atwater this morning in a bipartisan laudatory tribute capped off by the unveiling of his portrait.

“A wonderful, wonderful textbook example of what a president ought to be,” said Sen. Frederica Wilson, a Miami Democrat. “Mr. Atwater, President of the Senate, is a class act.”

Flanked by his wife Carole and two of his four children, Atwater addressed the Senate for the last time with just a week left to the 2010 legislative session. The North Palm Beach banker is quitting the Senate to run statewide for chief financial officer.

“I know we have been in challenging times. I know we have often asked the question, how do we get to this place of the prosperity and the opportunity that Floridians have so long fought for?” Atwater told the chamber, holding up a pamphlet. “I just would like to share with you two last places where I hold faith: the inspired words of our Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of our country.”
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The Republican Party of Florida essentially kicked former Chairman Jim Greer out of the party today, stripping him of everything but his voter registration card.

Greer’s successor, Sen. John Thrasher, removed Greer from all offices Greer held at a secret meeting in Tallahassee today.

The RPOF executive board unanimously supported Thrasher’s decision, Thrasher said in a statement.

Greer’s ouster from the party comes amid a federal investigation into the past chairman and other former high-ranking GOP officials and their credit card spending.
Greer filed suit today against the party last week, accusing the GOP of reneging on almost $124,000 he says the party owes him in severance pay.

“Based on the information that has come to light during the recent Party audit, I have determined that Mr. Greer has engaged in activities that have injured the name and status of the Republican Party of Florida, and has grossly interfered with the activities of the Republican Party,” Thrasher said in the statement.

Greer sued the GOP for allegedly reneging on almost $124,000 he says the party owes him in severance pay. He also accused the party in the lawsuit of offering him $200,000 in hush money, which RPOF officials deny.

Thrasher ordered an audit of the spending under Greer, and Gov. Charlie Crist, who hand-picked Greer to head the party after his 2006 election, asked federal investigators to launch an inquiry into possible misspending.

Above is the television ad from the Florida Education Association thanking Gov. Charlie Crist for vetoing the controversial teacher tenure bill last week. It sounds like this version is on the air in the Tallahassee market and something similar will be up soon across the state.

Meanwhile, we were leaked part of a recent poll from Hamilton Campaigns that asked 700 likely Florida voters these questions:

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The Senate approved a last-minute amendment that would carve out a special exemption for the Callery-Judge Groves development in West-Central Palm Beach County allowing builders to bypass rigorous planning requirements for large developments.

The amendment would allow county-created “limited urban service areas,” like Callery-Judge, counties to circumvent the review process for traffic rules and large developments.

The amendment was added by Sen. Mike Bennett, R-Bradenton, onto a growth management bill (HB 7099) shortly before the Senate passed the measure by a 36-2 vote.

The House could take up the measure as early as Tuesday, and if any more changes are made, send it back to the Senate for another vote before the session ends next Friday.

After six years, victims of childhood sexual abuse stand a good chance of eliminating the statute of limitations on sex crimes against children between the ages of 12 and 16.

Senate President Jeff Atwater said yesterday he wants the measure to pass and Gov. Charlie Crist said today he’s likely to sign it into law.

“It probably makes sense. It just sounds like common sense. If you find out that somebody committed such a heinous crime as that and it was a long time ago, it still was a heinous crime,” Crist told reporters today.

The House is expected to vote on the bill (HB 525) and the Senate could vote on it as early as tomorrow.

The Florida Catholic Conference has successfully thwarted similar legislation for the past six years, and continues to lobby against doing away with the current statute of limitations for institutions like the Catholic Church but supports doing away with the time restrictions on cases involving individual defendants.

On Tuesday, the Conference wrote a letter to Atwater, R-North Palm Beach, asking him to amend the bill to address the Catholic’s concerns.

“The open-ended nature of these proposals creates tremendous uncertainty for any organization’s potential liability for alleged acts of negligence,” Florida Catholic Conference executive director Mike McCarron wrote to Atwater.

“There’s no statute of limitations on suffering so there should be no statute of limitations on justice,” Atwater, who is running statewide for chief financial officer, told The Palm Beach Post yesterday.

UPDATE: The Senate Ethics and Elections Committee unanimously approved (SB 902) a tougher measure than the House’s version.

The Florida House approved a measure that would allow counties and cities to go beyond current state law in fines and jail time for county officials and staff who violate local ethics ordinances or financial disclosure requirements.

Under the measure, counties like Palm Beach could double the current fine from $500 to $1,000 and extend jail time from 60 days to one year for corrupt officials.

The House approved the bill (HB 1301) – one of Palm Beach County’s top priorities this session – by a 111-1 vote today, but the Senate is taking a different approach.

The Senate Ethics and Elections Committee is about to combine the ethics proposal with two measures that would impose much harsher penalties on corrupt officials pushed by Palm Beach State Attorney Michael McAuliffe.

Both anti-corruption proposals are being blended with a measure (SB 902) that would increase the legislature’s oversight over state agencies’ contracting, a priority for powerful Senate budget chief J.D. Alexander, chairman of the committee.

One of the harsher measures would make it a crime for any public official to knowingly withhold information about a financial interest in something on they vote or cause to take place. It would would also require disclosure of financial interests that could benefit a family member.

Another would enhance penalties for crimes, such as official misconduct, that public officials commit in their official capacity.

The two stricter measures are sponsored by Sen. Dan Gelber, D-Miami Beach, a former federal prosecutor who specialized in corruption cases. The PBC-backed proposal is sponsored by Sen. Dave Aronberg, D-Greenacres. The two colleagues are running against each other in a Democratic primary for attorney general.

McAuliffe said the changes in the law would make it possible for the state rather than federal officials to prosecute officials like the three former Palm Beach County commissioners and two city commissioners who went to prison on federal corruption charges.

Palm Beach County officials said those bills aren’t a priority and aren’t working to make sure those bills (SB 1076, 734) pass.

More on Dick Cheney’s endorsement of Crist’s current U.S. Senate GOP primary rival, House Speaker Marco Rubio here.

Other nuggets from Gov. Charlie Crist this morning:

*His reaction to a Florida Republican Party memo that county party officials — the grassroots activists of the state party — would violate their loyalty oath if they supported Crist’s possible independent bid or fail to ask for their contributions back:

“It’s premature,” Crist said.

*On whether he failed to shift with the political winds during the past year:

“Apparently I didn’t. But we’ll see,” Crist said. “It’s still too early to know. we don’t have an election for months. Then we’ll know.”

If Gov. Charlie Crist bolts the GOP and runs for Senate as a no-party candidate, Republican Party officials who wish to remain in good standing with the party would be obligated to renounce any past support for Crist and seek a refund of any past contributions to Crist’s campaign.

So says a memo interpreting the party loyalty oath this week from Republican Party of Florida General Counsel Jason Gonzalez, who used to be top lawyer in Crist’s office.

Gonzalez’s memo doesn’t mention Crist by name, but addresses the prospect of a registered Republican who runs on the ballot with no party affiliation. Crist, trailing GOP primary rival Marco Rubio in the race for a U.S. Senate seat, has been flirting with an independent run and has until April 30 to decide.

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Former Vice President Dick Cheney is endorsing Marco Rubio’s U.S. Senate bid.

A Cheney statement praises Rubio’s “strength of conviction” and says Gov. Charlie Crist, the onetime GOP frontrunner who’s now flirting with an independent bid, “cannot be trusted in Washington to take on the Obama agenda because on issue after issue he actually supports that agenda.”

Cheney urges Crist to stay in the GOP primary or dop out because “the only winners from an independent bid by Crist would be Barack Obama and Harry Reid.”

Read Cheney’s statement after the jump….

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Here are some of the high points (or low points if you’re one of the 85 Republicans who voted for SB 6) from Gov. Charlie Crist’s U.S. Senate campaign event in Jacksonville on Saturday.

Sen. John Thrasher, chairman of the maligned Republican Party of Florida, has a lot to contend with.

Things are heating up in the legislature with less than 10 days to go before the session’s end.

Federal investigators are snooping around former high-ranking GOP officials, including his predecessor at the Party Jim Greer, and their credit card spending.

And Gov. Charlie Crist is considering abandoning the party that helped him to victory in the state Senate, two Cabinet seats and the governor’s mansion.

Crist’s consideration of dropping out of the GOP primary against former House Speaker Marco Rubio and running as an independent in the fall has Crist’s former allies (and those who weren’t big fans of the governor to begin with) coming out in droves to distance themselves from the former sure-bet for U.S. Senate.

Thrasher offered some advice to Crist’s critics, including House Speaker Larry Cretul: Chill.
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The Catholic Church is ramping up efforts to water down a measure backed by victims of childhood sexual abuse that would do away with the statute of limitations on sex crimes on children between the ages of 12 and 16.

The Florida Catholic Conference wants Senate President Jeff Atwater to help modify the bill now that it’s ready to hit the Senate floor despite the conference’s lobbying to limit the number of years a victim has to press charges against a molester.

The Catholic conference is okay with doing away with the current statute of limitations for individuals who commit the crimes but wants a time limit on criminal or civil charges against institutions like churches involved in the abuse.

The reason? Money.

“The open-ended nature of these proposals creates tremendous uncertainty for any organization’s potential liability for alleged acts of negligence,” Florida Catholic Conference executive director Mike McCarron wrote in a letterto Atwater, R-North Palm Beach, yesterday.

“We fully support the added protection for children that will come from these bills. It is also our hope that an amendment will be adopted to reasonably limit what we believe is inequitable institutional liability for private employers.”

The House is expected to pass its version of the bill (SB 870, HB 525) tomorrow.

The church has fought off efforts to do away with the time restrictions for the past six years. Lawmakers have seven working days left before the session ends to pass the bill this year.

McCarron said he’s tried to amend the bill to exclude institutions or to set a time limit of up to 30 years.

Meanwhile, Pope Benedict XVI promised today that the Roman Catholic Church would take official action on a growing scandal over sexual abuse by priests.

In an unusual move, Benedict spoke openly about his meeting with abuse victims during a trip to Malta and said he promised them the church would take action.

“I shared their suffering and emotionally prayed with them,” the pope said during his weekly audience at The Vatican, describing his visit on Sunday with eight Maltese men who claim to have been molested by priests as youths.

The church will investigate the allegations, bring justice to those responsible for the abuse and “implement effective measures designed to safeguard young people in the future,” the Vatican said in a statement.

Last week, the Vatican issued guidelines instructing bishops to report abuse cases to civil authorities where required by local laws.
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UPDATE I: Video above includes clips from Gov. Charlie Crist being asked today about his U.S. Senate campaign, specifically if he would pull his support from a Republican who ran as an independent and his thoughts on Rep. Tom Grady’s letter yesterday.

UPDATE II: Grady says he has no proof that Crist “eliminated” anything from his website, but that it was fair to make the accusation. “This wasn’t a trial,” he said.

One of the fun things we use to cover Florida politicians is a website called ChangeDetection.com. It’s a free service that lets you know when content has been added to or deleted from a website.

We’ve been monitoring Gov. Charlie Crist’s campaign site for the past couple years and its data shows that no reference to “Republican” has been eliminated, as Rep. Tom Grady suggested in his letter to Crist last night.

We’ve not had a chance to talk with Grady yet today, so we don’t know what proof he has that Crist, who is considering an independent U.S. Senate campaign, might have scrubbed the site.

UPDATE: Sen. Joe Negron successfully attached the children’s services agreement to a bill dealing with early childhood education this afternoon but the Senate didn’t take a final vote on the bill (SB 2014) yet.

The state’s children’s services councils agreed to a deal with Sen. Joe Negron this year because they would likely have fared worse in the future, a lobbyist for the special taxing districts said.

Negron’s deal would require that voters reauthorize the state’s eight children’s services councils that have taxing authority periodically, beginning in 2014 with Martin, St. Lucie and Okeechobee counties.

The councils voted to accept the deal yesterday but Martin and St. Lucie refused to vote on the plan that would require voter reauthorization every 12 years unless the referendum specified another time frame or no future vote at all.

Negron, already a Senate leader after less than a year in office, will be even more powerful after his reelection in the fall, said the state council association’s lobbyist Ron Book.

Negron believes that all boards, councils or other groups that have the ability to tax citizens should be elected.

The Stuart Republican wants the change because he’s unhappy with the Martin council’s spending on a new headquarters.

Children’s advocates say the councils are an easy target because they have less clout than taxing authorities like water management districts.

“I think they’re right. But that doesn’t mean that he as a policy maker and an elected member of the Florida Senate shouldn’t move legislation that he thinks is right,” Book said.

He said the councils weren’t forced into the deal but they would likely do worse next year.

“There is less incentive for Sen. Negron to negotiate a compromise next year or the year after than there was this year,” Book said. “Sen. Negron becomes an even more significant leader in the Florida Senate after his reelection and I think that that is an issue they had to consider. Will you do better to negotiate a compromise today than later? They were in a better position to negotiate something that they could live with today than they would be next year.”

Negron, who plans to amend a bill with the compromise today on the Senate floor, said he never threatened the councils and that they are working with him to ensure that the House signs off on the agreement.
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When state Rep. Tom Grady, R-Naples, withdrew his support for Gov. Charlie Crist’s U.S. Senate bid Tuesday, he said the Crist campaign Web site appears to be telegraphing a Crist abandonment of the GOP in favor of an independent candidacy.

“This evening, as I reviewed your updated campaign website, I noticed a disheartening fact. Your website has eliminated all references to our Republican Party, or as you frequently refer to it, the party of Lincoln,” Grady wrote in a letter to Crist.

UPDATE: Our Mike Bender reports after using a data-monitoring service that no references to “Republican” have been removed from the Crist site. Grady hasn’t responded to a request to elaborate on his scrubbing claim.

There aren’t a lot of Republican mentions on the charliecrist.com site. But Crist spokeswoman Andrea Saul this morning denied Grady’s charge that GOP references have been “eliminated.”

Says Saul: “No Republican references have been scrubbed from our website, period.”

The “Meet Charlie” section of the site refers to Crist as a “common-sense conservative” without mentioning the R-word. And the “Voter Info” link refers to “the primary on August 24″ without specifying a party.

But if you look hard enough, there is some evidence on the site that Crist is a Republican.

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Gov. Charlie Crist‘s campaign says his website hasn’t changed at all now that the U.S. Senate candidate is openly considering dropping out of the GOP primary and running as an independent.

“No Republican references have been scrubbed from our website, period,” Crist’s campaign spokeswoman Andrea Saul said in an e-mail.

Rep. Tom Grady resigned as Crist’s regional campaign chairman today and quit his finance team, citing the website that makes no reference to the governor’s GOP affiliation.

Grady, a Naples Republican who was elected to the House in 2008 at Crist’s urging, is the latest GOP ally to distance himself from Crist and his U.S. Senate campaign after Crist admitted he is considering abandoning the Republican primary race against former House Speaker Marco Rubio and running instead in the general election in November with no party affiliation.

“This evening, as I reviewed your updated campaign website, I noticed a disheartening fact. Your website has eliminated all references to our Republican Party, or as you frequently refer to it, the party of Lincoln,” Grady wrote in a letter to Crist today distributed to the media by Trey Communications.

Once a sure shot to win in the primary against Rubio, recent polls show Crist trailing the Miami Cuban-American by about 20 percentage points.

Yesterday, National Republican Senate Committee Executive Director fueled speculation that Crist would abandon the GOP race saying there was “zero chance” Crist would run against Rubio.

“Things change,” Crist told reporters today when asked how he would explain to voters leaving the GOP primary after repeatedly saying he would not do so.

Grady was one of the few Republicans who attended the governor’s press conference at which Crist announced he would veto SB 6, the contentious teacher merit pay measure pushed by GOP leaders in the legislature.

Former U.S. Sen. Connie Mack III, Crist’s mentor whose name the governor frequently invokes, withdrew as Crist’s campaign chairman after the veto Thursday.

Read Grady’s letter after the jump.
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After repeatedly insisting that he’s not going to jump the Republican Party ship, Gov. Charlie Crist had a simple response to what he would say to Floridians if he does now that he’s considering running for U.S. Senate as an independent.

“Things change,” Crist said.

Those things might include GOP leaders demanding that Crist drop out of the race altogether if he decides to run as a no-party candidate.

Yesterday, the executive director of the National Republican Senate Committee said he believes there’s “zero chance” Crist will remain in the GOP primary against former House Speaker Marco Rubio, once an underdog in the race but who now holds a double-digit lead over Crist in the polls.

“It is our view that if Gov. Crist believes he cannot win a primary then the proper course of action is he drop out of the race and wait for another day,” NRSC executive director Rob Jesmer wrote in a memo.

Crist dismissed the suggestion in his typical populist style.

“I think I’ll take the advice of people in Florida instead of the advice of people in Washington. They’re telling us a lot,” he said.

Numerous GOP leaders in and outside of Florida are distancing themselves from Crist since he vetoed two bills important to Republicans in the legislature: a bill measure that would have allowed “leadership funds” and a teacher merit-pay bill pushed by Sen. John Thrasher, who is also the chairman of the Republican Party of Florida.

He said he’s “getting a lot of calls and a lot of text messages” offering him advice on what to do.

Crist acknowledged the almost surreal shift in the race in which he was once the hands-down leader and GOP officials virtually pretended that Rubio was not even in the race.

“These are unusual times. Arent’ they?” he said.

Thrasher, who said Crist reneged after telling him he would sign the controversial teacher bill into law, offered some lukewarm encouragement to Crist.

“In spite of policy differences that we’ve had, we have a big tent and I just hope he stays Republican,” the chairman said.

Republicans who once backed Crist may abandon him if he runs as an independent, which could hurt the Republican nominee. Or, he could take their support with him, something Republicans fear.

“I don’t know that they do. That’s the dilemma he probably has now. Again, you’d have to go follower-by-follower to find that out,” said Thrasher, R-Jacksonville.

A last-minute amendment on a sweeping health care provider bill would require Florida’s sickest Medicaid patients – those getting five or more prescriptions – to receive their drugs only by mail.

Opponents of the proposal, up for consideration this afternoon in Senate Ways and Means Committee, object that the change could harm Alzheimer’s patients, AIDS patients and others who need pharmacists to help them manage their medication.

It’s part of an ongoing battle between doctors and pharmacists over who gets to dispense drugs.

The meds-by-mail plan is being pushed by Prestige Health Choice, a physician-owned HMO that is participating in a Medicaid pilot project.

GOP Senate leaders refused to sign off on two of Gov. Charlie Crist’s appointees to the Public Service Commission and the likelihood of the pair getting confirmation from the Senate required for them to stay on the job is dim.

Committee chairman J.D. Alexander, who is also the Senate’s powerful budget chief and has long been at odds with Crist, abruptly called an end to the meeting this morning with three minutes left on the clock as the panel was in the midst of interrogating Commissioner David Klement.

That drew the wrath of Sen. Mike Fasano, a Crist supporter who has been a vocal critic of the PSC but praised Crist’s latest appointees. An irate Fasano, R-New Port Richey, said Alexander was “rude” and “inappropriate” to cut off the meeting before voting on the appointees.

Alexander denied that the failure to confirm Crist’s appointees was political retribution against Crist, who alienated GOP leaders with his veto of SB 6 and increasing speculation that he is going to break away from the Republican Party and run as independent in the U.S. Senate race against primary opponent Marco Rubio.

Alexander’s committee isn’t scheduled to meet again before the session ends on April 30, and the budget chief doesn’t appear interested in keeping Crist’s picks on the panel.

He said that Klement, a former editorial writer, and Benjamin “Steve” Stevens, a Panhandle bar owner and accountant, are unqualified to regulate billions of dollars in utility rate because they lack financial expertise.

The committee unanimously approved nearly four dozen other gubernatorial appointees before taking up the PSC appointments but left Klement and Stevens for last.

“I think we need more time to consider whether these folks are qualified. I don’t think these folks are qualified,” Alexander, R-Lake Wales, said.

Republican congressional hopeful Allen West, already a YouTube star with a 2.1-million-view video from late 2009, has drawn more than 46,000 looks in three days for this posting by the conservative Shark Tank blog from Saturday’s opening of a campaign headquarters in Deerfield Beach.

“We are going to show them what committed and convicted Americans have always done since the days we stood up against the British republic,” West tells supporters. “This is about fighting a dishonest tyranny, fighting against people that will lie to the American people and say we’re doing all this for the betterment of your lives when all they are doing is creating more slaves so that they can have control over them.”

West is challenging U.S. Rep. Ron Klein, D-Boca Raton, but his strongest words in this clip are aimed at House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

When he’s elected and goes to Washington, West says, “I’m going to say one simple thing to Nancy Pelosi: Give me that damn gavel.”