As promised, real estate mogul Don Peebles appeared on The Politics Hour with Kojo Nnamdi this afternoon, but he declined to make an announcement on whether or not he will enter the 2010 mayoral race.

“I’m weighing the decision very carefully,” Peebles said, a refrain we’ve heard from him so many times before. “I have to make a decision very shortly.”

DCist can’t figure out why Peebles agreed to appear on the District’s most prominent local politics show today if he didn’t intend on making an announcement. Resident analyst and NBC4 reporter Tom Sherwood apparently felt the same way, unleashing a torrent of incredulous questions at Peebles after it was clear there would be no news on his maybe-candidacy today.

“Waffles are for breakfast, not for political campaigns,” Sherwood quipped.

The dean of the local press corps didn’t let up on Peebles for the next several minutes, insisting that there must be some secret reason he’s still on the fence about launching a real campaign — a reason he apparently won’t share with the public. Peebles had said a few months back that his mother had recently died, and at the same time, his mother-in-law was battling cancer. Taking all that into account, he didn’t think it was the right time for his family that he enter the political arena. But over the last few months, Peebles has still been running around town talking like a candidate, granting interviews to local reporters and throwing verbal darts at D.C. Mayor Adrian Fenty. On the radio today, Peebles described Fenty as being “in over his head” and said he thought this was “an embarrassing time in the District of Columbia.”

In response to Sherwood’s grilling, Peebles merely insisted he didn’t need to succumb to pressure to decide by any particular date, and that he’s free to do that for one main reason: he’s loaded. The man can afford to throw down $4 million of his own money at pretty much any point in time. Put another way, “I don’t need tickets to Washington Nationals games,” he said.