Al Gore's own global warming fund has $5 billion in assets

Tweet Geneva: "The sustainable investment firm run by Al Gore, the former U.S. vice-president, is about to be closed to new investors, having raised close to its $5 billion target.

Generation Investment Management will probably restrict inflows into its main Global Equity Fund next month,

Gore and David Blood, co-founder of the company" (and former Goldman Sachs executive), "said at a news conference Tuesday.

Blood said the firm could not manage more than $5 billion in assets. While assets under management did not yet correspond to that figure, he said, commitments were in that range.

He declined to name clients, but said that they were typically institutions, with 45 to 50 percent coming from Europe, 25 percent from Australia and the rest from the United States.

The private Swiss bank Lombard Odier Darier Hentsch, which started selling the fund in Europe last year, is now the biggest investor in it, said the bank's senior partner, Thierry Lombard.

Gore and a United Nations panel on the environment were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in October for raising awareness of the threat from climate change.

The fund, founded in 2004 by Gore and Blood, formerly of Goldman Sachs, invests in companies that follow so-called socially responsible guidelines in the expectation that they will report better returns.

"More money is allocated by markets around the world in one hour than by all the governments on the planet in a full year," Gore said.

"The principles and ways and values that have an impact on the

• way markets allocate resources can have an enormous effect" in tackling climate change, he said.

• Gore declined to give performance details for the fund.

The fund's largest holding is the 7 percent of assets invested in Novo Nordisk, the world's largest insulin maker. Gore and Blood have also invested in Nestlé, the world's largest food company, and Johnson Controls, the largest maker of automotive seats and batteries.

Novo Nordisk, traded in Denmark, has advanced 34 percent over the past 12 months, while Nestlé has risen 2.1 percent in Zurich and Johnson Controls, in Milwaukee, has fallen 0.8 percent.

The Morgan Stanley Capital International index has declined 12 percent over the same period.

"The investors that are more attracted to the strategy we follow are managing long-term assets toward long-term goals," Gore said. "Those looking for a quick hit in the market place, to skim the cream and go somewhere else, those are not the investors attracted to this strategy.""

NY Times troubling reliance on children for reporting

Tweet It's a tried and true method--get to the parents through the kids, change the world, etc. Look at Al Gore, whose DVD was sent to most taxpayer supported public schools in this and other countries. (A Major League Baseball executive cites brainwashed school children's views as proof of man-made global warming). This removes all hope of individualism, parents are removed from shaping their own child's thoughts.

• (NY Times Public Editor, 11/17/08): "NOT long before the election, The Times published an unflattering front-page profile of Cindy McCain, inspiring a new round of accusations that the newspaper was biased against her husband.
  
• Some critics were especially angry about one of the reporting tactics: Trying to find sources for information about Mrs. McCain,
  
• a reporter reached out to 16- and 17-year-olds through Facebook, the social networking site....

How a newspaper like The Times should deal with minors — as news sources and as the subjects of articles — is a continually troubling issue. Facebook, MySpace and other such public windows into personal lives have made the issue more complicated. But the fundamental ethical questions remain the same:

• When is it appropriate to ask a youngster for information? When is it appropriate to quote a child on the record? When is it O.K. to name a minor involved in a crime or other news event?

• Kantor’s Facebook messages and a Times interview late last month with a 12-year-old witness to a high-profile arrest again tested where the balance is between the interests of the newspaper — and its readers —
  
• and the interests of children who may not understand the consequences of talking with a reporter.***

Kantor said she messaged students at three private schools, trying to find out if the McCains’ 16-year-old daughter, Bridget, attended one of them. She said she wanted to interview parents who knew Cindy McCain as a normal part of reporting on someone who might become the first lady. “I’ve talked to parents at the Obamas’ kids’ schools,” she said.

• In her message to “eight or nine” students, Kantor identified herself as a Times reporter and said, “I’d love to ask you some advice about a story.” She asked for parents and “anyone else I should talk to — basically anyone who has encountered Mrs. McCain and might be able to share impressions.” Kantor told me that she would never have quoted the teenagers themselves."...

***That's exactly why the Times puts children in this position. (sm)

Aftermath--only watch if you're not a girly man or a 1970's CCNY graduate

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Cultural Warrior

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Jay Severin is honest and not a girly-man

Tweet "WTKK-FM (96.9) host Jay Severin played a clip of Obama’s acceptance speech,

• then told the president-elect to “go screw yourself.”"

via Radio Daily News, 11/7/08

He who controls the language controls the culture

Tweet "The problem...is more basic - the Democrats control the language on such issues (as) ("count every vote", etc), and they're much better at demonizing. Why did McCain talk about Ayers but not even mention Wright? Because he was terrified someone would point a finger and cry "Racist!" And in four years' time the Democrats' media-cultural-organizational advantage on such subjects will likely be even greater. The salient feature of Ron Jones' brief appearance on TV yesterday is not that Mr Jones voted "a couple of times" in Philadelphia nor even that he was entirely comfortable about admitting as much on TV, but that CNN's Brian Todd beamed indulgently and said, "I think that's against the law but it's okay." That's the way large numbers of the American people feel about Acorn, the Undocumented Auntie, foreign donations and much else: it may be against the law but it's okay....

(...all the folks who told us McCain was the man, from Christopher Buckley to New Hampshire's primary voters, had no difficulty abandoning him for Obama)."

OBAMA SAYS HE WILL BANKRUPT COAL PLANTS

Tweet CHARLESTON, W.Va. (WSAZ) -- "With only hours before election day, coal has become a major topic of Decision 2008.

Sunday comments surfaced from a taped interview Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama did

• with the San Francisco Chronicle in January.

• In the interview, which has been available online for months,

Obama talks about the importance of coal. He went on to talk about

• his cap and trade proposal to help curb global warming.

• "If somebody wants to build a coal power plant they can, it's just that

• it will bankrupt them because they are going to be charged a huge sum for

all that greenhouse gas that's being emitted," Barack Obama said to the San Francisco Chronicle in January."...

OBAMA AUNT IN BOSTON HOUSING IS ILLEGAL ALIEN

Tweet OBAMA MUST REIMBURSE TAXPAYERS FOR YEARS OF PUBLIC ASSISTANCE PAID TO HIS AUNT. HE SAID HE'S HIS BROTHER'S KEEPER, BUT HE LIED.

• AND IS SELFISH EXPECTING YOU TO PICK UP HIS RELATIVE'S ILLEGALLY OBTAINED MONEY:

AP--WASHINGTON (AP) - "Barack Obama's aunt, a Kenyan woman who has been quietly living in public"

• Read: TAXPAYER SUBSIDIZED HOUSING

AP="housing in Boston, is in the United States illegally after an immigration judge rejected her request for asylum four years ago, The Associated Press has learned."
(AND SHE contributed $260 to the Obama campaign which is also not legal.)

AP="Zeituni Onyango, 56, referred to as "Aunti Zeituni"

• in Obama's memoir,

was instructed to leave the United States by a U.S. immigration judge who denied her asylum request, a person familiar with the matter told the AP late Friday. This person spoke on condition of anonymity because no one was authorized to discuss Onyango's case.

Information about the deportation case was disclosed and confirmed by two separate sources, one of them a federal law enforcment official. The information they made available is known to officials in the federal government, but the AP could not establish whether anyone at a political level in the Bush administration or in the McCain campaign had been involved in its release.

• Onyango's refusal to leave the country would represent an administrative, non-criminal violation of U.S. immigration law, meaning such cases are handled outside the criminal court system.
  

• Estimates vary, but many experts believe there are more than 10 million such immigrants in the United States.

The AP could not reach Onyango immediately for comment. No one answered the telephone number listed in her name late Friday. It was unclear why her request for asylum was rejected in 2004.

Onyango is not a relative whom Obama has discussed in campaign appearances and, unlike Obama's father and grandmother, is not someone who has been part of the public discussion about his personal life.

A spokeswoman for U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement, Kelly Nantel, said the government does not comment on an individual's citizenship status or immigration case.

Onyango's case—coming to light just days before the presidential election—led to an unusual nationwide directive within Immigrations and Customs Enforcement requiring any deportations prior to Tuesday's election to be approved at least at the level of ICE regional directors, the U.S. law enforcement official told the AP.

The unusual directive suggests that the Bush administration is sensitive to the political implications of Onyango's case coming to light so close to the election.

Kenya is in eastern Africa between Somalia and Tanzania. The country has been fractured in violence in recent years, including a period of two months of bloodshed after December 2007 that killed 1,500 people.

• The disclosure about Onyango came just one day after Obama's presidential campaign confirmed to the
  

• Times of London that Onyango, who has lived quietly in public housing in South Boston for five years, was Obama's half aunt on his father's side.

It was not immediately clear how Onyango might have qualified for public housing with a standing deportation order."

• IS SHE ON PUBLIC ASSISTANCE VIA THE HARDWORKING TAXPAYERS OF BOSTON?
  

• AS OPPOSED TO HER MILLIONAIRE NEPHEW OBAMA HELPING HER?

via the Drudge Report