Newt on Fox News, talks about NoMoreObamacare.com

Last night, Newt was interviewed by Greta Van Susteren about mainly the new website he set up to repeal Obamacare -- NoMoreObamacare.com -- and the GOP retreat this weekend, at which Gingrich will speak.

A portion:

[The House passing a repeal bill] is more than symbolic. Passing by a substantial margin the repeal of Obamacare is a very important first step. We have now over 100,000 signatures and they are growing every day. Our goal is to target the 23 Democratic senators who are up for election in 2012....

The Center for Health Transformation going to release tomorrow its third chart on Obamacare. This is a 50 square foot chart that lists the 1,969 grant of authority the Secretary of Health and Human Services in Obamacare. Thing about that, 1,969 grants of power over your health care to a single bureaucrat in Washington, D.C. I think combined with our earlier charts of 159 new offices under Obamacare and a 50 square foot chart of all the deadlines under Obamacare, those three charts are devastating examples of why we should repeal Obamacare.

Weekly Newsletter: Forever Stamp Folly

In this week's newsletter, Newt touches on the shootings in Arizona, writing that as more information surfaces, "the more clear it is he is a mentally deranged person who as early as his sophomore year in high school had fellow students and teachers worried about him."

He also writes about a Post Office decision. "This week," Gingrich writes, "U.S. Postmaster General Patrick Donahue plans to announce that all future stamps sales will be so-called 'forever stamps,' which can still be used even if postage rates go up."

Gingrich:

The Post Office will try to use any short term increase in sales from these forever stamps to solve their immediate fiscal problems. But if the Post Office is already having trouble operating at full capacity with current prices, imagine how difficult it will be to do so in five or ten years after inflation has pushed their costs up AND they are selling even fewer stamps because so many people already purchased them in the past.

In fact, this move is setting the stage for a future taxpayer bailout of the Post Office because it virtually guarantees its future bankruptcy.

he low price of stamps is not the reason why the Post Office is facing such huge deficits. The Post Office is seeking a 5.6% increase in the price of stamps despite an inflation rate of just 0.6%.

Instead, the Post Office is facing budget shortfalls because it is unwilling to engage in the necessary reform of its operations necessary in the modern economy.

As I discussed in To Save America, which is now out in an updated paperback version, the Post Office’s union work rules require it to pay a large group of employees more than a million dollars a week to do nothing. Instead of being able to lay off redundant workers, the Post Office (and by extension, every American who uses the mail) keeps them on salary through a program called “standby time.”

If the Post Office really wants to solve its fiscal challenges, it needs to engage in the difficult work of reforming its operating procedures, including its suffocating and costly union work rules like “standby time.”

Congress should block the Post Office from implementing this genuinely dumb move and force it to confront the true cause of its budget woes and implement real reform.

Newt's advisers: Tout your time as Speaker

Writing on usnews.com, Paul Bedard reports that "Newt Gingrich’s advisers are telling him that if he decides to run for the presidency, he needs play up his four years as speaker when many bipartisan policies were put into place."

One such adviser is quoted as saying: “Newt can say he has been there, done that on the economy and social issues, and then he can pivot and say how he’ll fix the current problems."

"Some think that his successes as speaker would top those of many two-term governors, like Indiana’s Mitch Daniels, because Gingrich worked on a national stage where victories are harder to score and have greater impact," writes Bedard.

I have noticed Newt talking up his time as Speaker of the House a lot -- more than he has in the past in my opinion -- during speeches, in his newsletters, and in radio interviews.