Free Republic

On the flat patch of the Texas Plains where Rick Perry grew up, the years are measured in harvests and rainfall. Rustic is putting too high a gloss on it. Until he was 7 years old, there was no indoor plumbing and the family used an outhouse. Bathing consisted of filling a galvanized metal tub on the screened-in back porch. When the wind blew, the dry dust from the fields seeped through the cracks in the planks and settled, much to his mother's dismay, on the couch and chairs. "It was a really old house. But it was home," Perry...

BANDUNG, Indonesia – Young Barry Obama is struggling with his pingpong shot. Or rather, 12-year-old Hasan Faruq Ali is struggling to play left-handed in imitation of the character he is portraying in a new Indonesian film, "Little Obama." ... The film tells the story of Obama's childhood in Jakarta, where he lived with his mother and Indonesian stepfather from age 6 to 10. "It's about his friendships, his hobbies, just a childhood story," said screenwriter and co-director Damien Dematra. "It's not about politics, it's just the story of a boy."

Next week marks the thirty-eighth anniversary of the launch pad fire of Apollo 1, which took the lives of Astronauts Gus Grissom, Edward White, and Roger Chaffee. In a grim irony, that same week also marks the nineteenth anniversary of the Challenger disaster, as well as the second anniversary of the loss of the Space Shuttle Columbia. Though memorials are certainly in order, a closer examination of the nature and cause of each catastrophe reveals much about the nation throughout the past four decades. Particularly in the wake of the Columbia tragedy and its ensuing investigations, disturbing trends in NASA...