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.

On today’s podcast:

Patrick Ruffini is an online media consultant who most recently helped build the record-breaking fundraising machine for U.S. Sen.-elect Scott Brown, R-Mass. In Florida, Ruffini is supporting Republican U.S. Senate candidate Marco Rubio. Ruffini predicted last week that Rubio would collect more money than his Republican primary opponent, Gov. Charlie Crist — a legendary campaign fund-raiser, as soon as the first quarter this year.

Ruffini was among the first to flag the upset potential in Brown’s campaign and predicted Rubio’s rise last summer, when few were giving the former Florida House speaker much of a shot. In July, Ruffini said Rubio would make it close race. Now, he tells us that Rubio is going to win.

His op-ed, ‘How Republicans won the Internet’, was published Sunday in the Washington Post.

Former Miami mayor Maurice Ferre is not the young, technologically-savvy candidate that immediately comes to mind when you think about the successful anti-establishment candidates of the past two years (Barack Obama, Scott Brown). But he is positioning himself as the outsider candidate in Florida’s U.S. Senate contest. And with a sitting governor and a House speaker two years removed from office on the Republican side and a sitting U.S. House member as his Democratic opponent, Ferre might have the most legitimate claim to that title.

In our interview, the 74-year-old Ferre criticizes Washington Democrats for trying to push health care reform in one omnibus bill. He said a better approach would be to offer the changes in smaller bills and let Republicans oppose the individual ideas.

Ferre says he’s raised just $100,000 so far $1 million last quarter for his primary opponent, Kendrick Meek), but he’s not worried. He’s focused on Orlando-Kissimmee voters so far and is expecting a big turnout from newly registered Hispanic Democrats.

LISTEN HERE (Or right click on the link to download.)

Here’s our interview with Florida Education Commissioner Eric J. Smith this morning after a ceremony for “Children’s Week” at the state Capitol.

In this 5-minute podcast, Smith says he expects the waiver application for the state’s school-related stimulus money to arrive from the feds tomorrow morning. If that happens, he said the state would return the application by the end of the week. Smith said the U.S. Department of Education has promised a two-week turnaround on the application. (This story details what the application is expected to include.)

He also weighs in on the Senate proposal to fund K-12 schools this year with Seminole gambling money and a proposed constitutional amendment that would weaken class-size restrictions and increase state sales tax by a penny to pay for schools.

Listen to the podcast here (Or click here to go to our podcast directory)

Sen. Durell Peaden, Jr., motioned with his hand for a reporter to enter his office while he was on his cell phone telling his wife that she’d be proud of him: He was offered some of the best apple dumplings he’d ever tasted that afternoon and only had a few bites. “She’s got me on a diet,” the Panhandle Republican explained after hanging up.

Peaden, the Senate’s top health & human services budget writer, isn’t just trying to manage his own health. He’s also in the middle of a hot debate over how the state should use a shrinking supply of tax money to pay for the increasing demand for public health services.

This 13-minute podcast starts off with a discussion with Peaden about A.G. Holley in Palm Beach County, the last free standing tuberculosis hospital in the country that was nearly axed from the state budget last year. It’s on the chopping block again with neither Gov. Charlie Crist nor the Senate including money for the hospital in their budget proposals (not sure about the House as of this moment).

Peaden, whose relatives have helped shape Florida policy since before statehood, discusses an equally long personal history with TB (including his own son being diagnosed with the disease that killed most of his ancestors).

“Somewhere there will be funding for AG Holley. It will not be neglected. Trust me. Because we’ll have the court on us or the governor or DCF … That will not go unfunded or uncovered. Trust me.”

Peaden also discusses the cigarette tax increase included in the Senate’s budget.

“Smoke ‘em, chew ‘em, dip ‘em or whatever. We have to tax ‘em. We have to tax cigars. Doesn’t matter if its … smuggled in from Castro. It doesn’t matter. They need to be taxed.”

Peaden says the money should not be earmarked for anything more specific than the state health budget (Sen. Ted Deutch, D-Boca Raton, wants to tie some of the new money to cancer research). But he says the new money shouldn’t replace what the state already spends on health care.

Listen to the podcast here (Or right click on the link to download.)

The content of the podcast informed this story that was published Sunday. The interviews are still timely and, by at least one account, still entertaining.

The first 14 minutes is an interview with designated House Democratic Leader Ron Saunders of Key West talking about how Republican leaders are more interested in “hijacking” bills than fulfilling their responsibilities. He admires Rep. Ellyn Bogdanoff, R-Fort Lauderdale, for her “blatant partisanship,” anticipates the next “memo” from House Republican Majority Adam Hasner, apologizes on behalf of the Democratic caucus “for not being stupid,” and says he’s going “do my best” to flip the 76-44 majority the GOP enjoys in the chamber.

“We are the minority party,” Saunders says. “We are their conscience.”

The 12 minutes that follow is a separate interview with Hasner, R-Boca Raton, who gets in his own jabs. He says the House Democrats “have become a party of no” — just like Republicans in the U.S. House. He says their a “continental divide” in the minority party and that the stimulus will “potentially create more problems in the future than it solves.”

Listen to the podcast here. (Right click on the link to download)