For Al Gore, climate change always was about his own pocket change not science. Since Gore had all the answers he never felt compelled to do basic research. For this he too became a Nobel Recipient.(See 1 and 1a below.)
Zuckerman running in New York? (See 2 below.)
Perhaps money will not have the same impact in 2010 as individual voters get more involved and energized. (See 3 below.)
Com'on to my house but what for? Obama now wants credit for Iran but will blame GW for everything else.
Lie, Lie, Cry, Cry
I am more American than Apple Pie
If you do not agree I might shrivel and die! (See 4 and 4a below.)
A response from a friend and fellow memo reader regarding Obama and the Sawyer interview. (See 4b below.)
I am about 40% of the way through reading Halberstam's "The Fifties" and just finished the chapter pertaining to Tennessee Williams, Elia Kazan and Marlon Brando.
Then I received this e mail from a wonderful curmudgeon friend of mine and could not help posting it again. My friend is in his eighties and, like myself, despises hypocrisy and fraud. We have an innate distrust of authority. We both enjoy defying conventional thinking and both remain in constant battle with the world and its ugliness but also find beauty on occasion. (See 5 below.)
Sardonic and mordant humor provide balance and cement. (To get the message See 5a below.)
Getting tough with Iran! Applying more diplomatic pressure. (See 6 below.)
Dick
1)Why Does the MSM Ignore Al Gore’s ‘Global Warming’ Million$?
By Kyle-Anne Shiver
In yet another case of willful blindness, our formerly august mainstream media all but ignores Al Gore’s global warming millions. Their secular saint, Prophet Al, has become a very rich man off his global warming “science.” Yet, whenever he is interviewed by those virtuous paragons among the media elite, you’ll hear nary a peep on the fact that Prophet Al stands to become the “World’s First Carbon Billionaire,” if and when governments – especially ours – enact the cap and trade legislation, of which Mr. Gore is the most vociferous proponent.
The lying hypocrisy of it is just too much for an honest person to bear.
Mr. Gore has, in effect, declared economic war on the middle-class American family through his global warming faux science. The Congressional Budget Office has estimated that the cap and trade legislation, which passed the House last year, will cost the average American family $890 per year. But the conservative Heritage Foundation immediately challenged this figure. Using a more inclusive analysis, Heritage raised the estimate to at least $1,870 per year.
Heritage also took the trouble – on behalf of American families – to take into account the larger picture, significant details completely ignored in the CBO’s accounting:
It is also worth noting that, of the 24 years analyzed by The Heritage Foundation’s Center for Data Analysis (CDA), 2020 had the second lowest GDP loss. Furthermore, the CDA found that for all years the average GDP loss was $393 billion, or over double the 2020 hit. In 2035 (the last year analyzed by Heritage) the inflation adjusted GDP loss works out to $6,790 per family of four–and that is before they pay their $4,600 share of the carbon taxes. The negative economic impacts accumulate, and the national debt is no exception. The increase in family-of-four debt, solely because of Waxman-Markey, hits an astounding $114,915 by 2035.
The bottom line here is that Al Gore is nothing higher on the moral scale than a war profiteer or as Investors Business Daily has called him, a “green Ponzi scheme” scammer. When Gore provided his star-witness testimony in the House last year on cap and trade, Representative Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) queried him on the millions he stands to make off the legislation. Gore responded that he was merely “putting my money where my mouth is.”
To which IBD scornfully added:
Perhaps, but at the same time he is advocating policies based on junk science that, while he enriches himself, will devastate the American economy, causing huge losses in jobs, economic growth and GDP.
The American consumer and taxpayer are on the wrong end of his green Ponzi scheme. Somewhere, Bernie Madoff is smiling.
Just to provide the hopelessly ignorant (or willfully blind) MSM with a bit of recap on Gore’s climate war profiteering, it might be useful to remind them of a few easily obtainable facts regarding our former VP, Prophet Al.
When Al Gore left the VP office, he reported a net worth somewhere between one and two million dollars. Currently his net worth is estimated in the hundreds of millions.
In 2004, Al Gore co-founded with former campaign manager, David Blood (also formerly with Goldman Sachs), an investment fund aimed at profiting from business and government initiatives to stop “global warming.” They affectionately call their venture: “Blood and Gore.” It’s real name is Generation Investment Management (GIM). GIM has its home base in London and lists a host of mega-corporations as investors, among them, Aflac, GE, Staples, SYSCO, UBS, Waters Corp. and Whole Foods. This is not the sort of venture capitalist scheme with which your ordinary American family could become a shareholder.
In 2006, Al Gore came out with his Oscar-chosen movie, “An Inconvenient Truth.” Due to the movie’s consequent hyping by an enthralled media, Mr. Gore’s “documentary” has grossed over $24 million in the U.S. and over $49 million worldwide, making it the fifth-highest-grossing documentary in the U.S. to date, (from 1982 to the present). Yet, in 2007, the U.K.’s High Court found that the film was both “biased” and “alarmist” and noted nine specific “scientific” claims, which were at best unfounded and at worst outright lies. To be shown in British schools, the High Court ruled, would require tedious instruction to students on the errors and bias contained in the film.
The British ruling was widely ignored by the MSM this side of the big pond, however, and the movie continues to be shown to unsuspecting students in government schools and universities nationwide – with no disclaimers whatsoever.
Interestingly, one of the film’s claims which was noted as unsubstantiated by Britain’s High Court was the recently debunked. Mr. Gore’s assertion that the disappearance of snow on Mount Kilimanjaro in East Africa was expressly attributable to global warming has been found unscientific and based on faulty research.
None of Mr. Gore’s newly demonstrated scientific errors should really come as any surprise, however (after all, the man flunked out of divinity school). As noted by the Washington Post in this 2000 article on Gore’s lackluster college transcripts, the media-heralded scientific genius — Prophet Al — spent his entire tenure at Harvard avoiding all courses in mathematics and logic. The two science courses he had to take, Natural Science in his sophomore and senior years, he managed to receive a D and a C+ respectively. Gore’s college science performance was easily predictable, however, as his high school transcripts showed that the only courses in which Mr. Gore scored A’s were in art and religious studies.
The MSM is so enthralled with Mr. Gore and his single-handed quest to save mankind from itself that they ignore every salient fact regarding not only the scientific sham, but every detail about the man himself, including his anything-but-sterling scientific background. Add to that shameful sycophancy their enabling of the man to bank multi-millions while he scams the public and the MSM becomes no less than an unindicted co-conspirator in Gore’s war on Western economies.
When Mr. Gore makes wild claims, which are later debunked by truly scientifically minded folks, the MSM is AWOL. When Mr. Gore blithely insisted recently on NBC’s Tonight Show that the “interior of the earth is extremely hot, several million degrees, and the crust of the earth is hot …,” neither the host nor the media elite know enough about science to even question his authority. When Mr. Gore belittled critics on the cost to American families of his cap-and-trade Ponzi scheme to ex-cheerleader-turned- anchorwoman, perky Katie Couric, she was so ignorant that she did not even question his recitation of accepted dogma.
Poppycock peddlers are found in every generation, but Al Gore’s get-rich-off-unsuspecting citizens is definitely a cake-taker in this lot of scoundrels. And for the love of Pete, one would think that any self-respecting journalist would go after him with at least the zeal they show in examining Sarah Palin’s hand.
Moral compass? The MSM does not seem to own a single working one among their entire lot of overpaid, under-worked scalawags. In allowing Al Gore to continue his green Ponzi scheme unobstructed, they prove they are all birds of a feather and have lost all credibility.
1a)Gore is too busy making money from the global warming scam to shovel snow.
2)Zuckerman Is Said to Be Weighing Bid for Senate
By MICHAEL BARBARO and TIM ARANGO
Could another media mogul be looking to make a splash in New York politics?
Mortimer B. Zuckerman, the real estate tycoon and publisher of The Daily News, is considering a bid for the Senate seat now held by Kirsten E. Gillibrand, according to two people told of the discussions.
Mr. Zuckerman regards Ms. Gillibrand as vulnerable to a challenge and is hoping that, at a time of economic tumult and political unrest, his background as an outsider to government, and his record as a business executive, will appeal to the state’s electorate, these people said.
He would be the latest boldface name to weigh a run for the seat this fall; a former Tennessee congressman, Harold E. Ford Jr., is mulling a primary run against Ms. Gillibrand, a fellow Democrat, and will make a decision in the next few weeks.
The discussions were preliminary, the two people cautioned, with many details of a possible candidacy yet to be worked out. They spoke on condition of anonymity because the talks were meant to be private and Mr. Zuckerman had not made up his mind.
Mr. Zuckerman is considering whether to commission a poll to test the viability of a candidacy, one of the people said.
A Zuckerman spokesman, Ken Frydman, declined to address any discussions that Mr. Zuckerman might have had about a Senate run, or any plans to conduct a poll.
Mr. Frydman said Mr. Zuckerman was unavailable for comment on Friday afternoon, but he added in a statement that the publisher “is not interested in running for public office.”
Mr. Zuckerman, 72, has long sought a national platform. He has cut a wide swath through the media landscape, buying and selling magazines like The Atlantic and writing a regular column for U.S. News & World Report, which he owns.
Though not currently enrolled in a party, he is known as a Democrat. But if he ran for the Senate, it would very likely be as a Republican or independent so he could avoid a costly primary.
As a candidate, Mr. Zuckerman would be following the path of a close friend and fellow media executive, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, who switched his party affiliation from Democratic to Republican to run for office.
Mr. Zuckerman, whose fortune is estimated to be about $2 billion, owes most of his wealth to the real estate industry. He co-founded Boston Properties, which owns and manages office buildings in New York and elsewhere, in 1970, and is now chairman of the board. He bought The Daily News in 1993.
If he enters the race, Mr. Zuckerman would quite likely have to relinquish management of the newspaper, one of New York City’s three biggest dailies, much the way Mr. Bloomberg handed over day-to-day control of his company, Bloomberg L.P., when he ran for mayor in 2001.
Mr. Zuckerman is an outspoken supporter of Israel, and over the last few years, he has become a high-profile student of the national economy, raising his visibility through television appearances on shows like “Meet the Press” and in newspaper and magazine opinion articles. He recently attended a White House economic forum.
Mr. Zuckerman, a resident of the Upper East Side of Manhattan, was born in Quebec. He is now an American citizen.
3)Senate GOP candidates lag in cash but lead in polls
By Jon Ward
President Barack Obama is greeted by Florida Gov. Charlie Crist, left, upon his arrival at MacDill Air Force Base on Thursday, Jan. 28, 2010. Crist has lost the 30-point lead in the polls he had last summer (AP Photo/Charles Dharapak)On paper, it’s not just the Republican campaign fundraising arms that have money problems. Several of their Senate candidates do as well.
In all but one of the eight states where Republicans are locked in primary battles for the party’s nomination, the Democratic candidates already have cash on hand advantages, some of them significant.
Add that to the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee’s cash on hand advantage over its Republican counterpart — it started the year with $12.5 million to the National Republican Senatorial Committee’s $8.3 million — and it looks like the GOP faces a steep uphill path.
“These primaries not only present political problems, but also are inhibiting GOP chances of building adequate war chests,” a Democratic strategist said.
Republicans argue that their leads in much of the polling, along with competitive primaries on the Democratic side, put them in what NRSC spokesman Brian Walsh said is “a far stronger financial position relative to the Democrats, compared to two years ago.”
Here’s the state of the races:
Arkansas: Sen. Blanche Lincoln, the incumbent Democrat, has $5 million in her war chest, more than five times as much as the two most serious Republican challengers combined. Rep. John Boozman has about $292,000, and state Sen. Gilbert Baker has $639,000. Yet the GOP is confident that either of those candidates will oust Lincoln, and the polling seems to back them up for now. The two most recent polls had both Boozman and Baker between 15 and 20 points ahead of Lincoln.
Colorado: Sen. Michael Bennet, the incumbent Democrat, has $3.5 million on hand and will snatch up a bit more on Thursday when President Obama campaigns for him. Compare that to the Republicans: former Lt. Gov. Jane Norton has $600,000 and Weld County District Attorney Ken Buck has $276,000. But Bennet is facing a stiff primary challenge himself from former state House Speaker Andrew Romanoff. And whiles some polls show Bennet slightly ahead of the Republicans, he is behind Norton in others.
California: Sen. Barbara Boxer, the incumbent Democrat, holds a big money lead here as well, with $7.3 million to the $2.8 million held by the most loaded Republican, former Hewlett-Packard chief executive Carly Fiorina. Former congressman Tom Campbell, who is leading his fellow Republicans in primary polling, has about $700,000, and state assembly man Chuck Devore has $226,364. Privately, Republicans downplay the significance of this race in the broader scheme, saying it is not one of their top pickup targets, but say either Fiorina or Campbell will at the very least give Boxer a tough enough run that she has to use most of her money and can’t transfer it to the national party.
Nevada: Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, Democrat, has $8.7 million. He also will get a fundraising boost from Obama this week when the president shows up in Nevada on Friday. The closest Republican is banker John Chachas, with $1.7 million. Businessman Danny Tarkanian has about $377,000, and former state Sen. Sue Lowden has roughly $498,000. But the state of this race is more clear than most: Reid is going to need every cent if he hopes to win reelection. Reid’s negatives are sky high in the state, and he trails both Tarkanian and Lowden in most polls.
New Hampshire: Rep. Paul Hodes, the Democratic frontrunner, has $1.4 million to the Republican front-runner Kelly Ayotte, the state’s attorney general from 2004 to 2009, who has $1 million. That’s a slight lead for Hodes given the fact that he entered the race much earlier than Ayotte. Ayotte consistently leads Hodes in recent polling by several points.
Pennsylvania: Sen. Arlen Specter, the former Republican turned Democrat incumbent, has a Harry Reid-size war chest, with $8.7 million. The closest Republican, former congressman Pat Toomey, has a respectable $2.8 million. But Specter faces a tough primary challenge from Rep. Joe Sestak, who has $5.1 million himself. And again, Toomey leads in the polls over both Specter and Sestak.
Kentucky: Jack Conway, the state’s attorney general and Democratic front-runner, has a slight edge over the two Republican candidates. Conway has $1.7 million while Trey Grayson, Kentucky’s secretary of state, has $1.4 million, and physician Rand Paul has $1.3 million. Again, a familiar dynamic is at play. Both Grayson and Paul lead Conway in the polls. And Conway faces a challenge of his own from Lt. Gov. Dan Mongiardo, who has $783,000 of his own.
Florida: You would think Republican Gov. Charlie Crist would be the clear leader, with a $7.6 million war chest. But he has lost the 30-point lead in the polls he had last summer over primary challenger Marco Rubio, the former state speaker, who has $2 million on hand. Rubio is considered by many in the GOP to be not only a lock for the nomination and the general election, but is also being looked to as a national leader. Democrat Rep. Kendrick Meek has a respectable $3.5 million, but few expect him to be any threat to Rubio or Crist.
Of this list, Democrats are ahead only in Colorado and California. So while the party has an edge in overall cash levels, they are facing some pretty difficult challenges in the overall political environment and look to have a number of very tough races on their hands.
4)White House hints Dems' talks could be done before summit
By Jeffrey Young
House and Senate Democrats could complete negotiations on a final healthcare reform package before they sit down with Republicans for a bipartisan summit that will be hosted by President Barack Obama.
The White House formally invited congressional leaders to the summit, planned for Feb. 25, on Friday. Near the bottom the letter lawmakers received from White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel and Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius is this nugget:
Since this meeting will be most productive if information is widely available before the meeting, we will post online the text of a proposed health insurance reform package. This legislation would put a stop to insurance company abuses, extend coverage to millions of Americans, get control of skyrocketing premiums and out-of-pocket costs, and reduce the deficit.
It is the President’s hope that the Republican congressional leadership will also put forward their own comprehensive bill to achieve those goals and make it available online as well. [Emphasis added]
Asked whether this indicated that Obama wants Democratic congressional leaders to wrap up their discussions about a House-Senate compromise package before the meeting, a White House official wrote: "We’ll have more details on this moving forward. Folks are continuing to work to bridge the differences in the House and [Senate] bills and we’ll have online a detailed and comprehensive proposal."
If that comprehensive proposal amounts to a final healthcare bill, Congressional GOP leaders will howl. Earlier on Friday, the top three House Republicans wrote House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) demanding their negotiations cease until after the summit.
Prior to losing the 60th Democratic vote in the Senate to Scott Brown (R-Mass.) last month, Obama, Pelosi and Reid appeared on the verge of striking an accord on the compromises needed to move a final healthcare reform bill through both chambers and get it on the president's desk.
Deprived by Brown of their filibuster-proof majority in the Senate, Democratic leaders have been forced to change their plan. Now, the House must pass the Senate bill and both chambers must passed a second measure containing their compromise language through budget reconciliation rules, which would allow the bill to pass the Senate on a simple majority vote.
4a)Blame-Bush Tack Is Wearing Thin
By GREG HITT And NAFTALI BENDAVID
WASHINGTON—Democrats are working hard these days to tell voters that the nation's economic problems were created by President George W. Bush. But that line of attack—which has buoyed the party significantly over the past four years—may be losing its edge.
In a string of recent elections, Democrats have tried to paint Republicans as Bush acolytes ready to lead a revival of his policies. One widely aired television ad in the recent Massachusetts Senate race showed a picture of Republican Scott Brown, and then shots of former President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney. Mr. Brown won anyway.
The results suggest voters are beginning to worry less about what Mr. Bush did, and more about what President Barack Obama will do to dig the economy out.
Indeed, most polls suggest there is little debate about which president should be blamed. In the most recent Wall Street Journal/NBC News survey, 65% of voters agreed Mr. Obama had inherited the nation's economic problems. But by a 49% to 43% margin, voters also said they disapprove of Mr. Obama's handling of the economy, underscoring how they have shifted responsibility for the issue to the Democratic president.
.The changing dynamics could deny Democrats a powerful message in this year's midterm elections and lighten a yoke that has weighed on Republicans since they lost control of Congress in 2006.
Some Democrats are beginning to acknowledge that invoking the Bush name might not be effective anymore. It has "lost any relevancy and therefore any potency," said Paul Begala, a longtime adviser to former President Bill Clinton.
Sen. Robert Menendez (D., N.J.), who is running Democrats' re-election efforts in the Senate, said the party instead wants to focus on Mr. Bush's record, if not his name. "I don't think this is about using George Bush as a bogeyman, but about Republicans owning up to their embrace of the economic policies that got us in this mess in the first place," he said.
Republicans, for their part, are saying it is time to move on. "The American people aren't waking up in the morning and blaming George Bush," said Virginia Rep. Eric Cantor, the House Republican whip.
Eric Fehrnstrom, a senior adviser to newly elected Sen. Scott Brown, noted that Democrats tried to paint the Massachusetts Republican as a Bush wannabee, to little effect. "The Democrats need a new playbook," he said.
Leveraging a president's unpopularity to political advantage is a well-established strategy. For decades after the Great Depression, Democrats deployed the image of Herbert Hoover while portraying themselves as guardians of working people. Ronald Reagan often invoked the economic record of Jimmy Carter on his way to a landslide re-election in 1984.
More recently, Democrats won over voters by criticizing Republican candidates for signing on to Mr. Bush's policies. The message helped fuel Democratic wins in 2006 and 2008, and in a couple of special elections last year for House seats.
The same tactics were deployed in January against Mr. Brown. Stumping in Boston before the vote, President Obama argued "what's at stake here" is "whether we're going forward, or going backward."
Mr. Obama and his Democratic allies have also begun highlighting Republican proposals that revisit pieces of the Bush agenda, such as a plan by Rep. Paul Ryan (R., Wis.) to allow younger Americans to invest some of their Social Security payroll taxes in the private market.
Democratic strategists are still urging candidates around the country to define the election year as a debate over Bush-era policies. A memo recently distributed by Mr. Menendez's Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee instructed: "It is incumbent upon your campaign to build the case that electing your opponent will mean a return to an economic approach that nearly drove us off a cliff."
In several battleground states, including New Hampshire and North Carolina, that has translated into Democrats seizing on Mr. Obama's proposal for a bank-bailout fee to draw distinctions with Republicans who oppose it.
Republicans, by and large, are shrugging off the attacks. In Massachusetts, Mr. Brown opposed the bank fee, called for across-the-board tax cuts and still won. He also studiously rejected any effort to link him to the Republican establishment and especially to Mr. Bush.
"As far as voters were concerned, it was like trying to tie him to Warren G. Harding," Mr. Fehrnstrom said.
4b)Re Obama's one-term comment to Diane Sawyer, doesn't he realize that the definition of a one-term president is a failed one? No such thing as being the best president for one term he can be. If he is not voted for a second shot, he failed the first time around. Which is why Dems would love to see Palin nominated. There is no way enough independents would come around and vote for her. Between the black and democratic votes plus our coreligionists who refuse to acknowledge the mistake of their first vote and will be willing to do it again, there are not enough votes available to defeat him.
5)The World's Shortest Books
THINGS I DID TO DESERVE THE NOBEL PEACE PRIZE
by Barack Obama
____________________________________________
OTHER BLACK PEOPLE I'VE MET WHILE YACHTING
by Tiger Woods
______________________________________________
THINGS I LOVE ABOUT MY COUNTRY
by Jane Fonda & Cindy Sheehan
Illustrated by Michael Moore
________________________________________
MY CHRISTIAN ACCOMPLISHMENTS & HOW I HELPED AFTER KATRINA
by Rev Jesse Jackson & Rev Al Sharpton
_______________________________________
THINGS I LOVE ABOUT BILL
by Hillary Clinton
________________________________
THINGS I LOVE ABOUT HILLARY
THE SEQUEL
by Bill Clinton
___________________________________
THINGS I CANNOT AFFORD
by Bill Gates
____________________________________
THINGS I WOULD NOT DO FOR MONEY
by Dennis Rodman
_________________________________
THINGS WE KNOW TO BE TRUE
by Al Gore & John Kerry
_____________________________________
AMELIA EARHART'S GUIDE TO THE PACIFIC
___________________________________
A COLLECTION of MOTIVATIONAL SPEECHES
by Dr. J. Kevorkian
__________________________________
TO ALL THE MEN WE'VE LOVED BEFORE...
by Ellen de Generes & Rosie O'Donnel
_________________________________
THE AMISH PHONE DIRECTORY
_______________________________________
MY PLAN TO FIND THE REAL KILLER(S)
by O. J. Simpson
_________________________________________
HOW TO DRINK & DRIVE SAFELY
by Ted Kennedy
______________________
MY BOOK OF MORALS
by Bill Clinton
introduction by Rev. Jesse Jackson
*******************************************************
AND JUST ADDED:
COMPLETE KNOWLEDGE OF MILITARY STRATEGY!
by Nancy Pelosi
5a)
6)US seeks to shore up support for tough Iran stance
By ROBERT BURNS
DOHA, Qatar – U.S. officials sought to shore up support Sunday for a tougher stand against Iran's nuclear program by saying Tehran had left the world little choice and expressing renewed confidence that holdout China would come around to harsher U.N. penalties.
Even as the Obama administration intensifies its diplomacy, Iran is showing little sign of bending to the will of its critics. Past U.N. sanctions have had little effect. Some outside experts have detected what they believe are new slowdowns in Iran's nuclear advances, but the Islamic republic is believed headed toward having nuclear weapons capability in perhaps a few years — estimates vary as to when.
President Barack Obama's senior military adviser called for more time for diplomatic pressure to work and said from Israel, which has hinted that it might attack if negotiations to contain Iran's nuclear ambitions failed, that such action could have "unintended consequences" throughout the Middle East. Israel views Iran's nuclear program as a threat to its very existence.
While diplomatic patience has its limits, "we're not there yet," U.S. Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said in Tel Aviv.
U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, on a quick visit to Persian Gulf allies Qatar and Saudi Arabia, told a forum on U.S.-Muslim relations that Iran has not lived up to its nuclear obligations and has rebuffed U.S. and international efforts to engage in serious talks. She said Iran has a right to nuclear power, but only if shown unequivocally it is to be used just for peaceful purposes.
While Iran insists it has no desire to get the bomb, Clinton said it appears otherwise.
"The evidence is accumulating that that is exactly what they are trying to do," she said during a question-and-answer session with her audience at the U.S.-Islamic World Forum, attended by officials and scholars from around the world. She also used pointed language in stressing that after months of failed efforts aimed at direct talks with Iran, tougher action is now required.
"It's time for Iran to be held to account for its activities," she said, alluding to penalties designed to squeeze Iran's economy.
In her speech, Clinton said the U.S. and others were working on "new measures" to try to persuade Iran to change its course.
She added: "I would like to figure out a way to handle it in as peaceful an approach as possible, and I certainly welcome any meaningful engagement, but we don't want to be engaging while they are building their bomb."
Obama has said that work to broaden economic sanctions in the U.N. Security Council is moving along quickly, but he hasn't given a specific timeline. China, one of five permanent members of the Security Council, has close economic ties to Iran and can block a resolution by itself.
"We have the support of everyone from Russia to Europe. And I believe we'll get the support of China to continue to impose sanctions on Iran to isolate them, to make it clear that in fact they cannot move forward," U.S. Vice President Joe Biden told NBC's "Meet the Press" from Canada, where he was attending the Olympics.
"We need to work on China a little bit more," added Obama's national security adviser, James Jones. "But China wants to be seen as a responsible global influence in this. On this issue, they can't, they cannot be nonsupportive," he told "Fox News Sunday."
Clinton struck a similar tone, saying in Doha that "the weight is maybe beginning to move" toward China supporting sanctions.
Clinton's stops in Qatar and in Saudi Arabia coincided with a string of diplomatic and military contacts in the Middle East, including Mullen's visits to both Egypt and Israel.
Her top three deputies — James Steinberg, Jacob Lew and William Burns — were expected in the region in coming days. So was Gen. David Petraeus, chief of U.S. Central Command with responsibility for U.S. military operations across the Middle East.
Their agenda is not focused exclusively on Iran. There also is an American push for closer cooperation in Yemen against al-Qaida, a move toward bolstering diplomatic relations with Syria and efforts to get Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations back on track.
Clinton's trip follows closely on the Iranian president's claim that his country had produced its first batch of uranium enriched to a higher level. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad also insisted on Thursday that Iran had no intention of building nuclear weapons, yet would not be bullied by the West into curtailing its nuclear program — a reference to new U.S. financial penalties imposed a day earlier.
Earlier Sunday, in Cairo, Mullen said after meeting with Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak that Iran was a key challenge to the security of the Middle East. He accused Tehran of spreading its radical influence in Lebanon, Gaza, Yemen and Iraq.
Saudi Arabia and Qatar, both situated across the Persian Gulf from Iran, are concerned about Iran's nuclear ambitions. They are seen by the Obama administration as an important part of a regional effort to persuade the Iranians that it is in their economic interest to give up their uranium enrichment program as called for in a series of U.N. resolutions that Iran has ignored.
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