Talking tough on illegal immigration helped Rick Scott score an upset Republican primary win in last year’s Florida governor’s race. Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney is betting the issue will sour GOP primary voters in Florida and elsewhere on Texas Gov. Rick Perry, who supports granting in-state college tuition rates to children of illegal immigrants in Texas.

A new web video from the Romney campaign associates Perry’s position with President Obama, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi and features a clip of former Mexican President Vicente Fox praising Perry for the Texas policy.

There’s also a clip of Perry from last week’s GOP debate in Orlando saying opponents of the program “don’t have a heart” — a statement that angered many conservatives as much as the program itself.

Donald Trump, the billionaire White House waters-tester who’ll headline Saturday’s South Florida Tea Party rally in Boca Raton, isn’t your typical tea partyer.

Trump is allied with the tea party movement in favoring repeal of the health care law and opposing tax hikes. But while exploring a 2000 Reform Party presidential bid, part-time Palm Beacher Trump supported universal health care and a one-time 14.25 percent “wealth tax” on individuals and estates with a net worth of more than $10 million.

But that was more than a decade ago.

More recently, Trump has given campaign contributions to some high-profile tea party foes.

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U.S. Rep. Alcee Hastings, D-Miramar, says it’s “more than likely” he’ll vote against the budget deal cobbled together late Friday night by President Obama, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., and House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio.

“Obama and Harry Reid ought to be ashamed of themselves and John Boehner ought to be doubly ashamed,” Hastings said today of the agreement to cut about $39 billion over the next six months. Details are still being worked out, but Hastings said it’s already apparent that “you’re getting ready to hurt poor people. I can tell you that without knowing where the cuts are coming from.”

Hastings in early March criticized Obama for being “slow out of the box” in budget talks. He reiterated that criticism today.

“I thought Obama should have been in much earlier. Quite frankly I think Obama is (concerned) about his 2012 election and couldn’t care less,” Hastings said.

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U.S. Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid told Washington D.C. reporters yesterday that he hasn’t talked to Gov. Charlie Crist in months. The statement refuted a Wall Street Journal story on the same day in which Crist said he recently talked to the Nevada Democrat.

Today, Crist told Tallahassee reporters that he phoned Reid and was non-committal on who he would caucus with if elected to the U.S. Senate.

If you’re still reading this blog post, the conversation is relevant because Crist if were to win the U.S. Senate seat with no party affiliation he would be free to caucus with either the Democrats or Republicans. After his defection/expulsion from GOP, many expect he would sit in on the Democratic meetings.

Is Charlie Crist a Harry Reid Democrat? A Ronald Reagan Republican? Depends on who’s labeling him.

Republican Senate hopeful Marco Rubio’s campaign is making much of this Wall Street Journal report that Democratic Senate Leader Harry Reid phoned Republican-turned-indie Gov. Charlie Crist last week in a possible “sign of cooperation” between Crist and Dems.

Democratic Senate candidate Kendrick Meek’s campaign, meanwhile, pointed to this three-month old NewsMax.com article in which Crist, then competing for the GOP primary nomination, called himself “anti-tax, pro-life, pro-gun Republican” and invoked Ronald Reagan a couple times.

Expect a lot more of this in the months to come. Rubio’s camp wants Crist to divide the Democratic vote. Meek’s team wants Crist to split Republicans.

WEST PALM BEACH — Attorney General and GOP governor candidate Bill McCollum dropped by tonight’s Palm Beach County Republican Executive Committee powwow and sounded at first like a federal candidate before throwing his likely Democratic opponent, Chief Financial Officer Alex Sink, into the mix.

“In Washington, President Obama and his administration and some of the friends we have over there like Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid are more worried about growing government than they are about growing jobs,” McCollum said. Sink, he added, “believes that the public should hold Tallahassee accountable for creating jobs. Jobs shouldn’t created by government, whether it’s the state or federal. Jobs are created by small businesses.”

McCollum also got a standing ovation when he repeated his pledge to use his position as AG to sue the federal government if Congress approves a health care overhaul that includes a requirement for individuals to purchase insurance.

FORT LAUDERDALE — Venturing outside their traditional milieu of tax-and-spending protests, about a dozen Tea Party activists and sympathizers stood at a street corner today to call for the ouster of Senate Majority Leader and amateur racial dialect theorist Harry Reid.

The event, billed as a “rally” Monday night and then bumped down to “news conference” status this afternoon, seemed to fall outside the South Florida Tea Party organization’s stated mission of promoting “three core values of fiscal responsibility, constitutionally limited government and free markets.”

Not exactly, organizers said.

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The South Florida Tea Party organization, which until now has focused on such tax-and-spending issues as the $787 billion federal stimulus bill and the massive overhaul of the nation’s health care system, sent out an e-mail Monday night urging activists to come to Fort Lauderdale this afternoon for a rally demanding the “immediate ejection of Harry Reid from office.”

Senate Majority Leader Reid, D-Nev., is in apology mode this week after a new book revealed he had commented approvingly on then-candidate Barack Obama’s prospects as a “light-skinned” African-American “with no Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one.”

A new book’s revelation that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., was enthusiastic about Barack Obama’s presidential prospects because he is “light-skinned” and speaks “with no Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one” created a firestorm over the weekend.

Republicans have blasted Reid and called for him to to step down from his leadership position while Democrats have generally circled the wagons in support of Reid.

Retired Lt. Col. Allen West, a black Republican running for a Palm Beach-Broward congressional seat, called Reid’s remarks “disgusting, despicable, and unacceptable. They are representative of how intellectual elite liberals do indeed speak of black Americans in their closed private spaces.”

But Debra Robinson, Palm Beach County’s only black school board member, said “I don’t see why it’s such an issue…I think that what he said was correct. My problem was he used the word ‘Negro,’ which is a bit outdated.”

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Democratic St. Lucie County Commissioner Chris Craft, who’s challenging U.S. Rep. Tom Rooney, R-Tequesta, in a Republican-leaning district, said Wednesday he’s “deeply concerned” that President Obama and Democratic congressional leaders might bypass a formal House-Senate conference on health care and hash out a private deal.

Craft is running as a “moderate and independent voice” in a district that voted for Republican John McCain in 2008. So he raised some eyebrows in the fall when he said he supported the House health care bill. That bill passed on a 220-to-215 vote in which most Dems from McCain districts voted no.

Now that the Senate has also passed a bill, there’s talk of scrapping the traditional conference and jettisoning Obama’s oft-repeated 2008 pledge to have the negotiations televised on C-SPAN.

Craft issued a statement Wednesday calling for a bipartisan solution on health care. Read it after the jump….

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