At the time of writing this, Python 2.7.3 is the latest build of the 2.7 builds. You can simply replace the wget url with the Python 3.x build you wish to download if you want to use those releases instead.

1. Download the tarball
   1. wget http://www.python.org/ftp/python/2.7.3/Python-2.7.3.tgz
2. Extract the contents
   1. tar -xzf Python-2.7.3.tgz
3. Navigate to the extracted folder
   1. cd Python-2.7.3
4. Configure/Install Python
   1. ./configure
   2. make
   3. sudo make install