Chicago Tribune: Trump's Team Suspended a Mortgage Insurance Rate Cut

By Andrew Khouri:

If you are shopping for a home and planned to use an FHA-backed loan, it means you will be paying the same premium rate for required mortgage insurance that you would have since January 2015.

For most borrowers getting an FHA-backed loan that means that after paying an upfront insurance fee, you will pay 0.85% of your loan amount for premiums each year. The Obama administration had planned to drop that rate to 0.60%. In 2014, the rate was 1.35%, after several increases to shore up FHA finances after the housing crash.

If the recent cut had gone into effect as expected Jan. 27, the California Assn. of Realtors estimates borrowers in the state using FHA loans would have saved an average of $860 a year.

The Full Story (January 23, 2017)

[Special] Editorial: Inside Donald Trump's Machado Disaster

As Graydon Carter noted over a year ago, "Like so many bullies, Trump has skin of gossamer. He thinks nothing of saying the most hurtful thing about someone else, but when he hears a whisper that runs counter to his own vainglorious self-image, he coils like a caged ferret." The Hillary Clinton campaign obviously knows this, because they set Donald Trump up for an epic meltdown, and he did not fail to deliver. As Josh Marshall of TPM explained:

As many have already noted, Clinton's mention of Alicia Machado's treatment at Trump's hands was no random, momentary decision. They'd seen Curiel; they'd seen Khan. She and her team know how Trump's lack of empathy, self-awareness and narcissism makes him ripe for these days' or weeks' long self-destructive tirades.

They laid the trap and he walked right into it.

Anyone with the most basic communications experience or simply a conscience knows there's a simple and solitary way to deal with something like this: "We quarreled years ago. I'm sorry we did. That's a long time ago. I wish her the best." Done and done.

But Trump can't do that because Trump can never admit he was wrong. In fact, it's more than an inability to admit error he has an affirmative need to be right and for everyone to know it. That's why, to the joy of Democrats, he's now on his third day of trashing Machado and defending his own actions, even though the story almost certainly would have died out without him doing so.

By Wednesday night, in his appearance on O'Reilly, he started the show off with a lengthy monologue attacking Machado. Far from mistreating her, he said, he'd saved her job; he'd given her the opportunity to lose weight (yes, this is a fair characterization of his words). And this was the thanks he got!