WEST PALM BEACH — Former U.S. Rep. Mark Foley and former GOP activist and bond underwriter Kevin McCarty are making their first post-scandal Forum Club appearances at today’s sold-out luncheon speech by Mitt Romney.

Foley, once a Forum Club regular, hasn’t been back since he resigned in a 2006 Internet sex scandal.

“People have been begging me to come back to the Forum Club,” Foley said as he worked the Kravis Center ballroom before the lunch.

McCarty was released in January after serving eight months in federal prison for failing to report wife Mary McCarty’s honest services fraud as a Palm Beach County commissioner. She’s serving a three-and-a-half-year sentence. Kevin McCarty declined to comment.

Florida Insurance Commissioner Kevin McCarty sat down Thursday with The Palm Beach Post editorial board:

McCarty predicted State Farm will stay in Florida but will have a smaller presence. That could be good news for homeowners, who have seen premiums soar since Hurricane Andrew roiled the state’s insurance market in 1992.

“A leaner, smaller State Farm in Florida is better than no State Farm in Florida,” McCarty said.

BOCA RATON — The keynote speaker couldn’t make it because she was sent to federal prison on a corruption charge, but the ethics seminar went on anyways today at Florida Atlantic University.

With disgraced former Palm Beach County Commissioner Mary McCarty unable to appear, a panel of lawyers advised about 50 local government officials on the federal honest services fraud law that has sent McCarty and four other elected officials from Palm Beach County to prison in the last three years.

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Send cards, letters, certain types of books and subscriptions to magazines or newspapers — but don’t send care packages — if you want to ease Kevin McCarty’s eight-month federal prison sentence.

So advises McCarty’s wife, former Palm Beach County Commissioner Mary McCarty, in an e-mail to friends this week as Kevin McCarty reported to a federal lockup in Miami for his role in his wife’s public corruption.

In her e-mail, Mary McCarty called it a “tough day” as her husband went to prison.

More tough days are coming soon. McCarty, who resigned in January and pleaded guilty in March to honest-services fraud, is to be sentenced next week for her misdeeds. She could face five years in prison, but has asked that she be incarcerated for no more than a year and a day.

Mary McCarty’s e-mail advised friends of some dos and don’ts now that Kevin McCarty is in prison.

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