Wednesday Beltway busyness

- The IRS, by Notice 2006-17, gives taxpayers until Oct. 16, 2006 to elect whether to deduct certain losses from the three top 2005 hurricanes.

- Secy's Snow and Jackson addressed the Senate Banking Committee today on the White house budget proposal.

- Ben Bernanke, newly head of the Fed, wants to put Fannie and Freddie on diets.

- HUD has posted a press release following up on last week's posting of rules for the new Disaster Voucher Program (DVP), which replaces the KDHAP Katrina housing relief program.

- The other day, opening a new homeownership program in Pittsburgh, Secretary Jackson spoke with particular warmth of Rep. Melissa Hart, R-Pa., "Not that I'm endorsing her..."

- Meanwhile, Assistant Secretary for Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity Kim Kendrick, who happens to be from Pittsburgh, was recently honored in Washington and had a pointed answer in Miami for a schoolgirl who brought up Kanye West:

What, 11-year-old Erin Wheeler asked, did Kendrick think about West's comment in September that President George W. Bush did not like black people?

''That comment,'' Kendrick responded, "was not a true one nor was it a responsible one to make.''

[MORE:

- The Federal Register today says HUD mistakenly swapped the Annual Adjustment Factors for the South and the Midwest when it published the list back on Dec. 1, 2005. Fortunately, it says the agency got the figures right in actual computations, so today's notice is just correcting the formal record.

- FEMA is about to suspend several areas in North Carolina, Nebraska and Missouri from its flood insurance program unless they can show they've been complying with federal flood plain management regulations.]