Palm Beach billionaire Jeff Greene’s entry in Florida’s Democratic Senate primary a few hours before Friday’s filing deadline wasn’t the first time he made a late entrance as a political unknown into a primary race.

Back in 1982, a younger Greene with fewer commas in his net worth made a failed Republican bid for a congressional seat in the Los Angeles area.

“He came in late and pretty much used his own money. We had to spend a significant amount in the primary because he came in,” recalled David Armor, who defeated Greene in the GOP primary but lost to former Democratic U.S. Rep. Anthony Beilenson in the general election.

Read about it in this week’s Politics column

With the Obama administration facing growing criticism and creeping Katrina comparisons for its initial reaction to the April 20 Deepwater Horizon rig explosion and subsequent oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico, White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs today offered a lengthy post on the White House blog defending the administration’s response.

Gibbs says President Obama “immediately began actively monitoring the incident and consulting on the response.” The word “immediately” appears four other times in the post and “quickly” appears twice, along with “rapidly” and “early on” and “from the start.”

Gov. Charlie Crist spent the final hours of his last spring legislative session in Miami, about as far away from the Capitol as he could get without leaving the state.

It was a fitting end to a tumultuous 60 days in which he received more attention for his public flogging of Republican lawmakers than any particular policy change he spearheaded.

The rift between the state party and its nominal head turned irreconcilable, but the physical separation could be short lived as Crist considers calling lawmakers back to Tallahassee to address tougher public corruption penalties, extend unemployment benefits or a rewrite the state’s $70.4 billion budget.

Story here.

Did President Obama and the federal government wait too long to take the Gulf oil spill seriously, relying on initial assurances from British Petroleum that the disaster was manageable?

Palm Beacher Rush Limbaugh and other conservatives are pushing the “Obama’s Katrina” idea, and liberal Media Matters for America is aggressively pushing back.

(Media Matters says, in Obama’s defense, that “British Petroleum reportedly led the Obama administration to believe that the spill was much less severe than it actually was.” Somehow we suspect that argument might have been cast differently if, say, the Bush administration had believed the assurances of a global energy corporation.)

Here’s a Wall Street Journal timeline of the disaster.

And here’s a story from The New York Times, not exactly a favorite publication of the Limbaugh crowd, saying the federal government “missed chances to act.”