Free Republic

SACRAMENTO - Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger expressed a new reaction Wednesday morning to one of President Bush's key policies: disbelief. Schwarzenegger, who campaigned for Bush's re-election's in 2004, said he couldn't understand the president's threat to veto pending federal legislation that would provide new money for children's health coverage. "When you hear decisions like that you say to yourself, ' What has happened? Why? Why would you go after children? Why would you not want to insure them?" said Schwarzenegger at a news conference promoting children's health insurance. "We all sit there and say 'Where did that come from? You can't...

WASHINGTON - Astronomers have stumbled upon a tremendous hole in the universe. That's got them scratching their heads about what's just not there. The cosmic blank spot has no stray stars, no galaxies, no sucking black holes, not even mysterious dark matter. It is 1 billion light years across of nothing. That's an expanse of nearly 6 billion trillion miles of emptiness, a University of Minnesota team announced Thursday. Astronomers have known for many years that there are patches in the universe where nobody's home. In fact, one such place is practically a neighbor, a mere 2 million light years...

NASA's Spirit Mars rover has arrived at a site dubbed "Home Plate" within Gusev crater. But what the robot found has left scientists puzzled. As the Mars machinery relays images of the area, the sightseeing has sparked healthy debate within the team running the mission. "Well, so far it has been great," said Steve Squyres, lead Mars Rover Exploration scientist at Cornell University. "It's the most spectacular layered rock we've ever seen at Gusev," he told SPACE.com. The images relayed so far by Spirit of Home Plate "really are stunning," Squyres added. "Many of us were pretty much reduced to...