WEST PALM BEACH — After speaking to a packed Forum Club of the Palm Beaches lunch here today, once and possibly future Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney deflected questions about a 2012 White House run (he says he’ll think about his future after the November midterm elections) and punted on the Charlie Crist-Marco Rubio GOP Senate primary (”Usually I stay out of primaries”).

But Romney, in a brief sit-down with The Palm Beach Post, was a little more expansive in discussing his altercation last month with electro-hop artist Sky Blu on a plane waiting to take off from Vancouver.

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Former U.S. Sen. Mel Martinez, who left office last year before finishing out his first term, has joined the board of directors of the state’s second largest utility.

Martinez, 63, was elected to Raleigh, N.C.-based Progress Energy’s board earlier this month.

Progress Energy operates Progress Energy Florida, which provides power to nearly 2 million customers in the Tampa Bay area. State utility regulators recently turned down the utility’s $500 million rate hike request.

Not a bad part-time gig for Martinez. The annual pay for outside directors like him is $80,000 including $30,000 towards a deferred compensation plan, according to the company’s federal SEC filings.

Prior to his election to the U.S. Senate in 2005, Martinez was the mayor of Orange County and was on the Orlando Utilities Commission. He’s been lobbying as a partner with the law firm DLA Piper since leaving office last year.

Martinez’s early retirement set off a political cascade in Florida and paved the way for Gov. Charlie Crist to take his place.

Crist appointed his own former chief of staff George LeMieux as a place-holder to fill in for Martinez until the November election. Crist is running in a GOP primary for the seat against former House Speaker Marco Rubio.

TALLAHASSEE — Former Republican Party of Florida Chairwoman Carole Jean Jordan said the GOP issued American Express cards to top officials while she was at the helm from January 2003 to January 2007, but “we were very careful. We set up a lot of business procedures….Nobody had carte blanche.”

The party made about $3.1 million in American Express payments during the four years Jordan was chairwoman. During the three years her successor Jim Greer was in charge, the party’s AmEx bills topped $3.8 million. Greer stepped down last month in part because of controversy over his lavish spending.

Jordan, now the tax collector of Indian River County, is in town for a Republican women’s conference. Asked her opinion of the American Express spending under Greer, she paused briefly, then said: “It’s over. We need to move on. I’m very excited to see Speaker/Sen./Chairman (John) Thrasher running the party.”

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Senate President Jeff Atwater said he is more than willing to hand over his Republican Party of Florida-issued American Express credit card statements but that the party’s new chairman, Sen. John Thrasher, won’t do it.

Reporters asked Atwater, who is running statewide for chief financial officer, about the notorious AmEx spending that’s embroiled former House Speaker and U.S. Senate candidate Marco Rubio and former House Speaker Ray Sansom.

“I asked Chairman Thrasher if he would release the statements of the RPOF credit card that was assigned to me and he said no,” Atwater, R-North Palm Beach, said. “He said he has his internal process going on…I have asked him and he has said no. That is the party’s card. It is not my card. I do not have the statements.”

When pressed about why Atwater did not request the statements, he insisted he could not.

“I’m not the card. That would be RPOF. It’s RPOF’s card. So if RPOF were to request those statements I assume they could get them. At this point, it is the party’s card. And I have asked the chairman would you release any card statements that were associated with me? I have no qualms about what anyone would see on that and he said no, we’re doing our process.”

Atwater had one of the AmEx cards while he was recruiting Republican Senate candidates and raising money for the party in 2007 and 2008. He says he used the card strictly for party-related business.

The cards, issued to an undisclosed group of top elected Republicans and party officials, have been a continuing source of embarrassment as details have emerged of lavish spending by former Chairman Jim Greer (including that $3,600 meal at Brasserie L’Escalier), indicted former House Speaker Ray Sansom (his $173,000 in AmEx charges included a family trip to Europe and an $893 Starbucks tab) and former exec director Delmar Johnson ($133,763 in a single month last summer).

Rubio got his turn in the AmEx spotlight last week when someone, presumably a supporter of opponent Gov. Charlie Crist’s slumping GOP Senate bid, leaked records of Rubio’s $125,000 in charges from 2006 to 2008. No Greer-scale extravagances emerged, but the records showed a $133.75 visit to Churchill’s Barber Shop in Miami that Rubio said he paid himself.

Sen. Mike Haridopolos and Rep. Dean Cannon - on tap to be the next Senate President and House Speaker - aren’t coughing up their state GOP-issued credit card statements, the pair said in a press release today.

“While the media is now calling for the release of many of the Party’s internal financial records, it is our firm belief that the professional auditors should be allowed to do their job without the interference of a media circus surrounding the release of any records,” Haridopolos, R-Melbourne, and Cannon, R-Winter Park, said in the release.

The leaders-to-be issued the release after former House Speaker Marco Rubio’s American Express statements were leaked to the media earlier this week, causing embarrassment for Rubio’s U.S. Senate campaign and glee for his GOP primary opponent Gov. Charlie Crist.

Crist has said that the Republican Party of Florida books should be opened up because of questionable spending by RPOF staff. The party’s spending was among the reasons former state GOP boss Jim Greer was forced out last month.

New RPOF Chairman Sen. John Thrasher, R-Jacksonville, ordered an audit of the party’s books to begin on Monday.

But he won’t release the statements, either.

The Democratic National Committee released a second video highlighting U.S. Senate candidate Marco Rubio’s state GOP party-issued credit card spending when Rubio was Florida House Speaker.

The Dems’ attack ad is curious, however, because it appears to promote Rubio’s opponent Gov. Charlie Crist.

Interspersed with newsclips from MSNBC and FoxNews are interviews with Crist in which he criticizes Rubio’s AmEx spending and comments that if Rubio doesn’t like the flak, “That’s too bad. Welcome to the NFL.”

Rubio racked up nearly $110,000 on his Republican Party of Florida American Express card -including expenditures for items like Internet music, wine and repairs to his family mini-van - that are raising eyebrows on TV news shows nationwide.

The first ad is a take-off on the MasterCard “Priceless” marketing campaign. It also ends with the RPOF’s Tallahassee street address and advises watchers to send their credit card bills there.

It’s no secret that the Florida U.S. Senate race has captured the attention of the national media and is a crucial race for both parties.

But much of the focus has been on the GOP primary featuring Gov. Charlie Crist, who is leaving office after only one term to pursue the post, and former House Speaker Marco Rubio, the first Cuban-American speaker of the Florida House whose somber face ran on the cover of The New York Times Sunday magazine not long ago, prompting Crist’s campaign to dub him “New York Times Cover Boy.”

While Rubio and Crist slug it out (and it’s getting uglier every day), U.S. Rep. Kendrick Meek, the Democrat who will likely face off against one of them in November, has been busily stumping around the state gathering petition signatures in the hopes of becoming the first U.S. Senate candidate from Florida ever to qualify by petition.

Read today’s New York Times article on Meek here.

Capitalizing on the scandal erupting over the state GOP’s credit card spending, national Democrats released a video take-off of the MasterCard “Priceless” television campaign.

The spoof highlights some of the Republican Party of Florida-issued credit card charges now-U.S. Senate candidate Marco Rubio made when Florida House Speaker, including $1,000 in repairs to his family mini-van.

“Getting your personal bills paid for by the Republican Party of Florida like Marco Rubio: Priceless,” the Democratic National Committee video mocks.

The state GOP may get some unwanted mail as a result of the “Priceless” satire.

“Want your bills paid for by the Republican Party of Florida? Just send them in. 420 E. Jefferson Street, Tallahassee, Florida 32301,” it concludes.

The DNC ad targets Rubio at a time when the once-long-shot candidate’s popularity is soaring while his GOP primary opponent Gov. Charlie Crist’s is on the wane.

While the expense showed up on the Republican AmEx, Rubio paid the tab at Churchill’s Barber Shop himself and never charged it to the state GOP, a Rubio spokesman Alex Burgos said today.

Still, the expenditure generated the kind of tonsorial attention lavished on Bill Clinton for his Christophe-administered Air Force One clip job in 1993 or John “Two Americas” Edwards for his $400 coiffures during the 2008 presidential campaign.

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Marco Rubio’s Senate campaign fired back at GOP primary rival Charlie Crist late Wednesday night following the release to the Miami Herald/St. Petersburg Times of Rubio’s Republican Party of Florida credit card statements from 2005-2008. Rubio accuses Crist of trying to “change the subject” from his own record.

Unlike a letter Rubio released Wednesday night, the new video doesn’t address the specifics related to the RPOF American Express card — perhaps because it appears to have been shot months ago, at the same time Rubio was taping this video on health care reform.

Conservatives have been lavishing praise on Republican Senate hopeful Marco Rubio’s speech last week to the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington.

Admiration of Rubio’s speech also comes from the left in this piece by The New Republic’s John Judis, who called Rubio’s speech “a masterpiece of political positioning” that “hovered above partisanship.”

Judis says Rubio’s blend of biography and political vision was reminiscent of Barack Obama and Bill Clinton. And he said Rubio avoided what he considered the rhetorical excesses of other CPAC spekers.

“Rubio also didn’t brand his political opponents socialists. He didn’t describe the White House as followers, as one daffy speaker put it, of Marx, Engels, Che Guevara, Hugo Chavez, and Saul Alinsky.”

The unnamed “daffy” speaker was South Florida Republican congressional hopeful Allen West.

Of Rubio, Judis concludes: “The 39-year-old Cuban-American who has the looks of a matinee idol and speaks with wit and vigor is a force to be reckoned with.”

Rubio: leads GOP race 54-36

Former Florida House speaker Rubio has a 54-to-36 percent lead over Crist in a poll of 442 likely Republican voters taken last Thursday — the day Rubio made a much-publicized speech to the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington.

Crist: approval numbers slipping

Rubio had a 12-point lead in a late-January Rasmussen poll. Rubio and Crist were tied in December.

Rubio

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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Rubio

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.

Crist

What about Crist?

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