“Military Band Parades Foreign Colors Through U of NM” - the blog Borderlands, USA is new to me, but this vignette of symbolic life at what is nominally an American university, complete with photographs, is very telling, and unlikely to be reported in the MSM.

I saw this at the grocery store the other day:

Only one question came to mind–why? Why is Celia Cruz on a box of Corn Flakes?

Apparently this is a multicultural promotion by Kellogg�s [email] available only in limited areas�which seems to include the entire state of California.

It also includes most of Florida.

Here is an interesting story about a Hispanic grocery store in Palm Beach County which is promoting its new store location with Cruz Cornflakes campaign.

Ironic side note: The new Hispanic market moved into the old, recently bankrupt Winn-Dixie grocery store.

Am I the only one who sees the writing on the wall?

A reader made an interesting point about my column last week titled “Hispanic Vista’s View of America, and Ours.”

He wrote that although I am correct that US efforts to curtail illegal immigration through ill-conceived amnesty and guest worker programs have consistently failed, I should have mentioned that earlier deportation programs were completely successful.

According to reader M.M.,

“Operation Wetback, in the mid-1950’s, put a damper on illegal immigration that lasted over 20 years.”

Tom Sowell deploys one of the most ruthless intellects currently to be seen commenting in the MSM - he positively scared my wife at a Manhattan Institute lunch years ago, given, I think, to mark the publication of his book Civil Rights: Rhetoric or Reality. And he refuses to be bullied, abandoning his Forbes column, I understand, rather than tolerate increased interference after the retirement of the great Jim Michaels as editor of that magazine.

So it is not a surprise to find him devastating the latest attempt to allege racism as the cause of less favorable access to mortgage credit by blacks (which is doubtless preparatory for a campaign for state-mandated preferences).

This matter is something of a family business. My brother, with co-author Leslie Spencer, did a lot to derail the previous bandwaggon run. They pointed out in a Forbes article that the 1992 Boston Federal Reserve study was fatally flawed in failing to comprehend the implication of the similarity between white and black default rates:

The market, in short, worked. The mortgage lenders somehow weeded out the extra credit risks among minorities, down to the point where white and minority defaults were at an equal, apparently acceptable, rate.

The current effort makes much of the heavier reliance by blacks on the recently-developed high-cost subprime mortgage product. It remains to be seen if force-feeding credit like this is really good either for the borrower or the lender. As Sowell observes:

Often the solution is worse than the problem.

Hat Tip American Renaissance