BREVITAS

CRASH TALK

BBC - House prices in 20 US cities fell by a record annual rate of 18.04% in October, according to the The S&P/Case-Shiller home price survey. . . David Blitzer, of Standard & Poor's said that "home prices are back to their March 2004 levels". . . The city which showed the biggest price-fall was Phoenix, where home prices plunged 32.6% in the year to October - followed by Las Vegas, which was down 31.7% and San Francisco, down 31%.

Naftali Bendavid, Wall Street Journal - Democratic leaders are increasingly concerned that they won't be able to offer an economic stimulus package for congressional debate until late January because they haven't received a plan from President-elect Barack Obama's transition team. . .

Rep. David Obey (D., Wis.), chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, added, "I had been hoping that the timetable would be this week" for having a proposal in hand. But Mr. Obey said Mr. Obama's team, which recently met with congressional committee leaders, is still determining the details of the package it wants. "The Obama people are still trying to chew through all of that, to decide what they think works and what doesn't at this stage," Mr. Obey said. . .

"First we've got to have some signals called by Obama," Mr. Obey said. "It's hard to negotiate with somebody if the other party hasn't decided what they want out of the negotiations."

OBAMA LAND

BBC - Barack Obama says he agrees with Senate Democrats that they should not accept the man chosen by Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich to replace him as senator. . . The president-elect said he agreed the Senate "cannot accept" a new senator chosen by Mr Blagojevich, adding that Mr Blagojevich himself should resign.

Obama Meter: down one. Current score: 19%

OUTLYING PRECINCTS

Radar - The New York press has started to stick a fork in Caroline Kennedy's bid to be appointed to the senate seat which will be vacated by Hillary Rodham Clinton. . . "The wheels of the bandwagon are coming off,'' wrote the New York Daily News while New York Post State Editor Fred Dicker has already declared her one of the losers of 2008. Even the liberal New York Times called her frustratingly "vague (and) undefined and seemingly determined to remain that way.'' Blogs have taunted her for the number of "you know" and "ums" she used in recent media interviews.

Daniel De Groot, Open Left - Obama's cabinet includes two each of sitting Governors and Senators (Clinton, Salazar, Richardson, Napolitano). You might include Biden too, making the score 3 and 2. The significance is that all of these have given up powerful, independent roles in the Presidential feeder leagues for subservient roles within the Presidency. If you look at the Republican side, McCain had no shortage of eager Senators and Governors willing to be his VP either. For Bush's first cabinet, he didn't pick any sitting Senators, but he did pick 2 sitting governors, and at least 2 others were under serious consideration. Similarly for Obama, it is pretty clear he could have had even more Senators (Kerry, Murray, Dodd) and Governors (Granholm, Blagojevich) if he had wanted them. . . Clearly things have changed, and the Presidency is now the best game in town, or out of it.

POLICE BLOTTER

Houston Chronicle - The number of crashes at Houston intersections with red-light cameras doubled in the first year after their installation, according to a city-financed study. . . Critics of the initiative, which mails $75 civil fines to drivers photographed running red lights at 50 intersections, said the study shows that cameras actually cause more crashes and bolsters their argument that the program is more about generating revenue than protecting the public.

Portland Press Herald, ME - Freeze! A Portland man faces charges of burglary and drunken driving after his arrest atop a Zamboni machine at the Cumberland County Civic Center early Tuesday morning. Adam Patterson, 23, had inadvertently summoned the Portland Fire Department to the civic center by driving a forklift, with the forks raised, into part of the sprinkler system, setting off an alarm, police said. Firefighters responded at 2 a.m. to find Patterson trying to drive the large ice resurfacer, which was against an interior wall and not on any ice, police said. . .

INAUGURAL INFO

DC GOVERNMENT UPDATES

WASHINGTON CITY PAPER

TEN MYTHS ABOUT DC

RECOVERED HISTORY

David Rose, Vanity Fair, April 2008 - Vanity Fair has obtained confidential documents, since corroborated by sources in the U.S. and Palestine, which lay bare a covert initiative, approved by Bush and implemented by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Deputy National Security Adviser Elliott Abrams, to provoke a Palestinian civil war. The plan was for forces led by Dahlan, and armed with new weapons supplied at America's behest, to give Fatah the muscle it needed to remove the democratically elected Hamas-led government from power. (The State Department declined to comment.) But the secret plan backfired, resulting in a further setback for American foreign policy under Bush. Instead of driving its enemies out of power, the U.S.-backed Fatah fighters inadvertently provoked Hamas to seize total control of Gaza.

Some sources call the scheme "Iran-contra 2.0," recalling that Abrams was convicted (and later pardoned) for withholding information from Congress during the original Iran-contra scandal under President Reagan. There are echoes of other past misadventures as well: the C.I.A.'s 1953 ouster of an elected prime minister in Iran, which set the stage for the 1979 Islamic revolution there; the aborted 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion, which gave Fidel Castro an excuse to solidify his hold on Cuba; and the contemporary tragedy in Iraq.

FURTHERMORE. . . .

Tom Sherwood, NBC Washington - According to HCD Research of Flemington, N.J., (mediacurves.com) 62 percent of Americans in a national poll said they would break the law and illegally pay off a state governor in order to get a job that pays $100,000 a year if they were guaranteed not to get caught. And 58 percent of the 808 Americans surveyed said they would make a payoff -- if it were possible to do so without consequences -- to fix a reckless driving offense, obtain quality medical coverage or receive improper help to save a business.