Free Republic

The last time Jeb Bush held an education summit in Washington, as he does today, scores of reporters and a big crowd showed up. The headline: Bush seeks balance on Common Core under 2016 glare. Two years ago, speculation raged over whether Bush would run for president. Finally, in June 2015, he jumped in with a big splash of money. The rest is well-known. Today, Bush continued his re-emergence in a space he feels most comfortable in: policy wonk. He kicked off his Foundation For Excellence in Education summit with an 8:45 a.m. speech. "This is a time for big...

I am hearing some support for Donald Trump coming from fellow travelers — tea partiers, constitutional conservatives, and even a few libertarians — in my grassroots community. So I have to ask: What's up with that? At a superficial level, I get it. I get the economic anxiety and a belief, completely justified, that insiders in Washington, D.C. are really all about themselves, not the rest of us. I also get the profound political paradigm shift that is taking control from party bosses and shifting it back to the voters and activists that participate in the political process. This democratization...

Bedford, New Hampshire (CNN)Jeb Bush and Donald Trump clashed over how to handle the Syrian refugee crisis -- and just about everything else, including whether Bush is really friends with Marco Rubio -- during dueling Wednesday night town hall events in New Hampshire. By the end of the night, Bush had even told Trump to put on his "big boy pants." In their most substantive policy dispute, the two disagreed sharply over whether refugees who fled the Middle East amid ISIS' rise should be allowed in the United States. "I think we're duty-bound to provide support," Bush said in Bedford.