The artificial reef is to be created by sinking the retired U.S. Air Force missile-tracking ship General Hoyt S. Vandenberg, which monitored NASA space launches from 1963 to 1983.

Since 1984, the ship has been among other decommissioned vessels at the James River Naval Reserve Fleet in Virginia's James River. The so-called Ghost Fleet is being thinned because of environmental concerns.

Bidding on the online auction site eBay Inc. begins at $900,000, with a reserve price of $1.3 million, said Joe Weatherby, a project organizer with Artificial Reefs of the Keys.

It's the last piece of a funding puzzle required for the $5.7 million project. ARK has gathered $3 million, but needs to come up with the remaining money to avoid losing the ship to scrapyard.

"This is for someone who is looking for a legacy," Weatherby said. "It's something for an individual or a company that is permanent and positive for the environment."

And no longer will we pay attention to political strategists who assert that swing voters aren't important and that independents and moderates don't matter. If Democrats are to make good use of the power they have been granted, they need to remember that last point. This election was the revenge of the center no less than it was the revenge of the left. The decisive votes cast on Tuesday came from moderates and independents, whom the exit polls showed favoring Democratic House candidates by about 3 to 2.

Nancy Pelosi and the other Democratic leaders face a genuinely complicated political calculus. On the one hand, Democrats would not have won without the intense dedication of their partisan and ideological base. Among self-identified Democrats, the party's House candidates won by about 13 to 1. Liberals went about 8 to 1 Democratic. This energy was critical to the outcome.

But many of the party's successful candidates ran as moderates, and Democrats hold power on the basis of a loan of votes from middle-of-the-road Americans who simply could not stomach Bush Republicanism anymore. The loan can be recalled at any moment.

The good news for Democrats is that their candidates, moderates and liberals alike, ran on two common themes: that the Bush Iraq policy had to change and that the Washington establishment simply does not understand the personal struggles and economic insecurities confronting so many Americans.

In the aftermath of the historic GOP losses Tuesday night, moderate Republicans quickly concluded that the party needs to be more moderate. Conservative Republicans declared that it should be more conservative. Main Street is angry at Wall Street, theo-cons are angry at neo-cons, and almost everyone is angry at President Bush and the GOP congressional leadership…..

"We ought to just mend our wounds, bury our dead, learn from our mistakes and move on," said GOP lobbyist Ed Rogers. "But first we're going to have go through this. Look, bad policy and bad politics makes for bad elections."

The common theme of the Recriminatathon is that the party lost its way after seizing control of Congress in 1994, focusing on power and perks instead of principles. But behind all the maneuvering, posturing and backstabbing lingered a serious debate over the party's future, and what those principles should be. It's a familiar argument between confrontation and compromise: appealing to base voters on the right or independents in the middle.

The moderate Republican Main Street Partnership fired its first salvo on election night, unleashing a news release titled "Far Right Solely Responsible for Democratic Gains." Sarah Chamberlain Resnick, the partnership's director, complained that GOP leaders had rejected popular causes such as the minimum wage, embryonic stem cell research and lobbying reforms while ignoring health-care issues that did not involve Terri Schiavo. The result, she said, was that moderate suburban voters saw Republicans as extremists.

"This election isn't a repudiation of the GOP," Chamberlain said. "It's a repudiation of a handful of zealots, and a reminder that you can't build a majority party without securing the middle of the American electorate."

That wasn't the conclusion the right drew from Tuesday's losses. The main theme on GOP conference calls and the conservative blogosphere was that Republicans need to act like Republicans, returning to the small-government principles that helped them seize power in 1994. The RNC's first talking point for the day was: "Recommitting to conservative reform." Reps. Mike Pence (R-Ind.) and John Shadegg (R-Ariz.) announced campaigns for minority leader and minority whip by invoking the GOP's "Contract With America" and criticizing Republicans for betraying principles of stronger ethics and tighter budgets.

Tuesday's Democratic election victory was by any measure decisive, yet in the perspective of history also unsurprising. In the sixth year of a two-term Presidency, Americans rebuked Republicans on Capitol Hill who had forgotten their principles and a President who hasn't won the Iraq war he started. While a thumping defeat for the GOP, the vote was about competence, not ideological change.

….

The GOP "base" voted in respectable numbers, but enough of it voted for Democrats to make the difference. At 32%, the self-identified conservative share of the electorate was down only slightly from 2004 (34%), and the liberal share of 21% stayed the same. What changed is that the GOP won fewer conservative and independent votes.

….

Democrats were able to exploit this frustration even without offering much of their own agenda. While this worked in the campaign, it leaves in doubt how Democrats will use their new power. In the minority, they could assail "George Bush's war" and threaten impeachment to mobilize their base without fear of being held responsible. Now they will have to govern. For Ms. Pelosi, this will mean deciding how much deference to give to the Great Society liberals who will soon run most House committees. Henry Waxman, David Obey, Pete Stark, Ed Markey, John Conyers, Barney Frank: These are sons of the Sixties who helped drive the Carter and Clinton Presidencies off a cliff.

They represent the soul of the Democratic House but not the desires of most voters in the 15 seats or so that provided their margin of victory on Tuesday. To sustain their majority in 2008 and beyond, Democrats will have to hold such seats as those won in eastern Pennsylvania by pro-military veterans Admiral Joe Sestak and Chris Carney, or in North Carolina by pro-life, anti-gun control Heath Shuler.

We doubt voters in those seats chose Democrats with a goal of "censuring" Mr. Bush, much less impeaching him, or because they want a tax increase or an unseemly retreat from Iraq. Flooding the Beltway with subpoenas and partisan hearings may be cathartic for the Bush-hating left, but it won't send a signal that Democrats are different from the DeLay Republicans. If Ms. Pelosi sides with the antiwar Jack Murtha against Maryland's moderate Steny Hoyer in the race for House Majority Leader, Republicans will be overjoyed at this signal that the old liberals are back in charge.

At least Republicans now know where the "Bridge to Nowhere" leads: to the political wilderness. But there are three reasons for conservatives to temper their despondency.

First, they were punished not for pursuing but for forgetting conservatism. Second, they admire market rationality, and the political market has worked. Third, on various important fronts, conservatism continued its advance Tuesday.

Of course the election-turning issue was not that $223 million bridge in Alaska or even the vice of which it is emblematic — incontinent spending by a Republican-controlled Congress trying to purchase permanent power. Crass spending (the farm and highway bills, the nearly eightfold increase in the number of earmarks since 1994) and other pandering (e.g., the Terri Schiavo intervention) have intensified as Republicans' memories of why they originally sought power have faded.

But Republicans sank beneath the weight of Iraq, the lesson of which is patent: Wars of choice should be won swiftly rather than lost protractedly. On election eve the president, perhaps thinking one should not tinker with success, promised that his secretary of defense would remain. That promise perished yesterday as a result of Tuesday's repudiation of Republican stewardship, which, although emphatic, was not inordinate, considering the offense that provoked it — war leadership even worse than during the War of 1812.

Passenger lists from thousands of ships that left Britain and Ireland packed with migrants between 1820 and 1960 were published on a genealogy Internet site on Thursday.

The ancestors of many famous Americans, including Hollywood actors Cruise and Berry, were among those who risked everything to make the voyage across the Atlantic Ocean.

New arrivals helped swell the U.S. population from 9.6 million in 1820 to 76 million by 1900.

Migrants left Britain and Ireland for many reasons — to escape poverty and persecution, to join their families or to try to make their fortune.

Simon Harper, managing director of the Web site, www.ancestry.co.uk, said it celebrates the "brave and colourful individuals who played a significant role in shaping what has become modern America".