Obama Denounces D-Day Landings

From a nearby slightly altered universe:

In a speech today presidential candidate Barack Obama maintained his steadfast disapproval of the D-Day landings of June 6th, 1944, despite the historical evidence of it as a smashing Allied victory over Nazi Germany.

"Even knowing what we know today, I would never commit to Operation Overlord," the Senator explained to a diverse cross section of New York Times reporters and members of NARAL's executive committee. "It should have been obvious from the debacles at Kasserine Pass and the Anzio landings, not to mention the unending quagmire of the Italian campaign as a whole, that simply putting more troops into the European theater was never going to bring the violence to an end."

When asked what his alternative approach would have entailed, Obama responded, "I would have brought the troops home via a 16 month timetable." This was greeted with wild applause. "Peace in our time!" yelled more than one.

At that point an unidentified man in the back of the room pointed out, historically speaking, the entire European war didn't even last a further 12 months after the successful D-Day landings. Obama waived this away by proclaiming the need for, "change! We cannot be bound to the history of dead facts!" Many of the crowd moved towards the unidentified questioner for "further clarification" of his point.

After a short delay for the removal of the corpse, Obama brought the throng to its feet one last time. "This is the reason I have been chosen! This is the reason I am running unopposed for the White House! Because, I would rather lose than admit to being wrong. Facts be damned."

Several NARAL supporters received medical treatment after swooning

T Party

While I generally find The New York Times news coverage and editorial positions to be badly skewed to the left, the still carry wonderful feature stories. Such as this little gem describing some of the ways people customized their Model T automobiles. The Tin Lizzie turns 100 this year, so this is a fitting tribute to American ingenuity, both on the part of Henry Ford and of his customers.

No duty was too mundane or extreme for the wildly popular T, which became known by the nickname flivver. By jacking up the rear end and replacing one wheel with a pulley and leather drive belt, the Ford made a fine stationary power plant for milling grain or spinning the saw blade of a mobile lumber mill.

Even years after its heyday, the T continued as the Swiss Army knife of automobiles. In the 1930s, a group of New England ski enthusiasts created the first tow rope on the slopes of Woodstock, Vt. Their initial source of power was a well-worn Model T equipped with a Pullford tractor conversion, its huge steel drive wheels turing at just the right speed to reel skiers up the mountain.

Even when the original bodies and frames had rusted away, T owners would swap out the nearly unburstable Ford engines and drive axles to power boats, oil derricks, stationary pumps and other devices .

The car’s do-it-all utility sprang from a combination of stout basic design and widespread availability, said Robert Casey, curator of transportation at The Henry Ford museum and Greenfield Village, in Dearborn, Mich., and author of “The Model T: A Centennial History” (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008).

There are some great pictures along with the article. Here's The Henry Ford Museum's pages on the Model T. This is the Model T Ford Club's website. And here is a short illustrated history of the Model T.

Pilgrimage

Despite growing up mostly in Rochester, New York only a fairly short trip from it, I had never visited Gettysburg. Well, that has been corrected now. I am writing this from a hotel right in the center of the town of Gettysburg. We rolled in here at around 4pm and have not had a chance to see much yet. My wife and I strolled a bit through the town and we've taken the kids to dinner. They just went out to take a "Ghost Tour" of the city, something I have no interest in whatsoever. Tomorrow, I plan to visit the places I have only read about. But places I know well from the words of others. The Peach Orchard. The Wheat Field. Devil's Den. Culp's Hill.

Little Round Top.

I'll have pictures.

Three Great American Ideas

Go read what Maggie Gallagher wrote.

Rights do not come from the government. The government only exists because we allow it to. Those are the ideas - the ideals - that define America.

When in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security. — Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.

Are we perfect? Oh no, we are not. But we are a darn sight better than others have been - and for a longer time, as Gallagher points out.

HMS Ontario

Two dedicated shipwreck hunters have located the nearly intact wreck of HMS Ontario in deep water off the southern shore of Lake Ontario.

Rochester, New York – The HMS Ontario, a British warship built in 1780 has been discovered in deep water off the southern shore of Lake Ontario. Shipwreck enthusiasts Jim Kennard and Dan Scoville located the ship utilizing sophisticated side scanning sonar and an underwater remote operated vehicle. The HMS Ontario is the oldest confirmed shipwreck and the only fully intact British warship to have ever been found in the Great Lakes.  

HMS Ontario Founders

In the early evening hours of October 31, 1780, the British sloop of war HMS Ontario sank with over 120 men, women, children and prisoners on board during a sudden and violent gale. The Ontario had departed earlier in the day from Fort Niagara, near the western end of Lake Ontario, for Oswego and then on to Fort Haldimand located on Carleton Island in the St. Lawrence River. The following day some of the Ontario’s boats, hatchway gratings, binnacle, compasses and several hats and blankets drifted ashore in the area that is known today as Golden Hill State Park, located 30 miles east of Fort Niagara in New York State. Following the reported loss of the Ontario, the British conducted a wide search of the area on land and water. A few days later only the ship’s sails were found adrift in the lake. In late July 1781, six bodies from the Ontario were found approximately 12 miles east of the Niagara River near Wilson, NY. This was the extent of the items ever found from the ship until its recent discovery.

Jim Kennard and Dan Scoville searched over 200 square miles of the lake in their three year search. The pictures they got are stunning. They are hoping to make a documentary of the discovery.

Obama As Millennialist Aspiration

We live in an age of Millennial aspirations. 

Everywhere you look you can see signs of widely disparate groups of people who believe they are living in an age where established norms will be destroyed by this or that newly arisen force.  This can take the usual religious overtone, as witnessed by the Left Behind devotees, but we are increasingly seeing non-religious forms of Millennialism play out even in the main stream press.

In my local paper today I was treated to a dead serious take by the AP on survivalists up in the mountains:

On the PeakOil.com Web site, where upward of 800 people gathered on recent evenings, believers engage in a debate about what kind of world awaits.

Some members argue there will be no financial crash, but a slow slide into harder times. Some believe the federal government will respond to the loss of energy security with a clampdown on personal freedoms. Others simply don't trust that the government can maintain basic services in the face of an energy crisis.

The powers that be, they've determined, will be largely powerless to stop what is to come.

Determined to guard themselves from potentially harsh times ahead, Lynn-Marie and her husband have already planted an orchard of about 40 trees and built a greenhouse on their 7 1/2 acres. They have built their own irrigation system. They've begun to raise chickens and pigs, and they've learned to slaughter them.

The couple have gotten rid of their TV and instead have been reading dusty old books published in their grandparents' era, books that explain the simpler lifestyle they are trying to revive. Lynn-Marie has been teaching herself how to make soap. Her husband, concerned about one day being unable to get medications, has been training to become an herbalist.

By 2012, they expect to power their property with solar panels, and produce their own meat, milk and vegetables. When things start to fall apart, they expect their children and grandchildren will come back home and help them work the land. She envisions a day when the family may have to decide whether to turn needy people away from their door.

"People will be unprepared," she said. "And we can imagine marauding hordes."

So can Peter Laskowski. Living in a woodsy area outside of Montpelier, Vt., the 57-year-old retiree has become the local constable and a deputy sheriff for his county, as well as an emergency medical technician.

"I decided there was nothing like getting the training myself to deal with insurrections, if that's a possibility," said the former executive recruiter.  

While you are contemplating who would win the iron cage death-match between "marauding hordes" and "executive recruiters," notice how this type of thing has come a long way from the "raving loon" territory it would have been consigned to just a few years ago.  As a society we seem to be more willing to entertain such Millennial fantasies, whether it be the belief in "peak oil" or in some "anthropogenic global warming tipping point," that will in effect destroy the Western world as we know it.

Now, part of this might be baby boomer nostalgia for the days when the nuclear holocaust was always due "any day now, so you'd better learn to Duck & Cover," and while it is certainly a horrible prospect it did assign a level of importance to the generation(s) destined to live through it.  Sure, they actually lived lives of suburban contentment, but Jimmy's dad down the street was building a bomb shelter in the basement which was something the boring schmucks growing up in the 1910's or 1920's never got to witness.  So, the baby boomers considered themselves to be the first (and only) generation living in a state of near perpetual existential angst.  As such they created a mythology of their own "specialness" that seems destined to govern the broadcasting decisions of PBS for decades to come. 

So, it shouldn't come as a great surprise that such folk view damn near everything that effects them as being "unprecedented" in some important way.  For that reason, history has no lessons to teach them.  "Those are the old rules!" they protest, "Everything is different now."  And how exactly do they know that?  Well, it seems to be taken as axiomatic.

It also seems to be a belief the boomers have successfully transfered to the present college age generation who seem similarly convinced of their own "specialness."  Take the efforts of E. J. Dionne:

Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne Jr. predicted in his commencement address to Wake Forest University’s 2008 graduating class that they are part of a group that will become the next “greatest generation.”

Dionne’s comments garnered an enthusiastic response from the crowd of about 15,000 people

They were willing to applaud praise of themselves for their soon to be revealed greatness?  How noble and selfless of them!

Dionne is at least up front about his Millennialism, and he enlists that great prophet, uh…I mean president, FDR for support:

Dionne explained that he drew the title of his address, “The Reform Generation and History’s Mysterious Cycle,” from a speech Franklin D. Roosevelt gave at the 1936 Democratic National Convention, at which Roosevelt said “There is a mysterious cycle in human events.  To some generations much is given. Of other generations much is expected. This generation of Americans has a rendezvous with destiny.”

“I believe those words apply more truly to your generation than to any other since FDR addressed them to what came to be known as the greatest generation,” Dionne said.

Yes, the generation that was forced to live through the horrors of the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl is the perfect analogy for this generation which was forced to live through the horrors of Paris Hilton and Brittany Spears. 

One is left with the impression that much of the baby boomer "specialness" is little more than a defensive reflex to hearing their parents drone on about how rough they had it during the depression or WWII.  The historical truth is moments like the Great Depression or World War II are unique in their import and their impact.  Not every generation is going to see the like.  (I wonder if the generation that came immediately after the 30 Years War in Europe reacted the same way.) 

So you are left with a group of people whose very self worth is bound up with an overwhelming need for a heroic quality.  Thus, their wants and desires are not just the expression of their ego, it is the spirit of the age!  And, it isn't just any chronological age. It marks, so the good little Hegelians tell us, the beginning of a new epoch in humanity, for good or ill.  Its a psychology tailor made for Millennial thought.

Such thinking dominates not only in the desire for catastrophism of various kinds, but also in more mundane political considerations.  Historian Sean Wilentz picks up a good deal of this in the current beliefs infusing Obama supporters:

With her overwhelming victory in Kentucky on May 20, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton has completed her sweep of the crucial primary states adjoining the Ohio River — and the fight for the Democratic nomination has entered its final phases. Having picked up a net gain of nearly 140,000 votes between Kentucky and Oregon, Clinton is now well poised to win the Puerto Rico primary on June 1 - and clinch a majority in this year's popular vote, even if the disputed returns from Michigan are discounted. Under those pressures, the Barack Obama campaign and its sympathizers have begun to articulate much more clearly what they mean by their vague slogan of "change" - nothing less than usurping the historic Democratic Party, dating back to the age of Andrew Jackson, by rejecting its historic electoral core: white workers and rural dwellers in the Middle Atlantic and border states.

Without a majority of those voters, the Democrats have, since the party's inception in the 1820s, been incapable of winning the presidency. The Obama advocates declare, though, that we have entered an entirely new political era. It is not only possible but also desirable, they say, for Democrats to win by turning away from those whom "progressive" pundits and bloggers disdain variously as "Nascar man," "uneducated," "low information" whites, "rubes, fools, and hate-mongers" who live in the nation's "shitholes." [emphasis added]

It is this fervent belief that the rules of the political game will change for them merely because of the force of their generational personality that is driving the Obama moment.  It is essentially the same idea that enabled the boomers to walk blindly into the Democratic electoral disasters of 1968 and 1972.  It is also the same force which precludes Obama supporters from learning from that history in the first place. 

Wilentz sums it up nicely:

In every presidential election they have won, the Democrats have solidified their historic link to white workers, not dismissed them. Obama and the champions of a new party coalition appear to think that everything has suddenly changed, simply because of the force of their own desires. In any event, Obama had shown no ability thus far to attract the one constituency that has always spelled the difference between victory and defeat for the Democratic Party. The party must now decide whether to go along with Obama and renounce its own heritage — and tempt the political fates.

The fact is Millennialism is about embracing opposites.  Just like their Chistian analogues, they not only accept a positive view of their destiny (the "Reformist Future" as "Second Coming"), but they also embrace a negative one akin to Armageddon.  For many of these zealots, they would rather walk with righteous fervor into an electoral buzz-saw than bow to the practical necessities of political reality.  Ordinary people would take such repudiation as a signal that their beliefs were misplaced, but we are not dealing with ordinary people.

They will tell you so themselves.   

Democrat’s “American History” Gap

First we had Barack Obama's complaint about not being able to visit all 60 states, and now we have another, shall we say, "interesting" take on American history:

The special congressional election in Mississippi today is an important one. The GOP can’t afford another defeat and morale-deflator. Republicans have poured on the money to retain the longtime, reliably conservative district.

So, what are Dems up to? You won’t be surprised. Several Mississippi readers and bloggers e-mail that the Dems have pulled out the race card to smear GOP candidate Greg Davis as a KKK supporter.

Wow!  What a coup for the Democrats to get to run against a Klan supporter!  It's perfect, except for one thing:

DCCC says "Greg Davis wanted to honor the founder of the KKK with a statue in Southaven" and also said the statue was of "the first Grand Wizard." But in reality, the statue was of Jefferson Davis who was not the founder and never in the KKK. In fact, another place that has a statue of Jefferson Davis is the United States Capitol Building. Jefferson Davis is one of the two statues representing Mississippi, along with James Z. George.

That's right.  The Democrats were laboring under the impression that Jefferson Davis founded the KKK, as opposed to Nathan Bedford Forrest.  Oops.  However, it is easy to forgive the DCCC about the confusion.  After all both Forrest and Davis were Democrats.

Could have happened to any ignorant person.

Losing History

There is a referendum today in Berlin. People are being given a chance to vote in a non-binding referendum on whether the city should close Tempelhof airport. The city planners have refused to be bound by the results, despite the public outcry that has forced the issue onto the ballot in the first place.

"Tempelhof is the pearl of the German capital," says Klaus Eisermann. 
Many Berliners feel strong nostalgia for Tempelhof airport

He has been working at Tempelhof airport for the last 44 years, and he knows every nook and cranny.

As he drives me around the vast airfield, the monolithic terminal building stretches out in front of us.

It is claimed that there are only two other buildings in the world bigger than Tempelhof - the Pentagon, and Ceausescu's palace in Bucharest.

"I'm really sad that they're going to shut down Tempelhof," says Mr Eisermann.

"It's such an easy airport to use and you can reach the city centre in 20 minutes - it's so simple and it's a beautiful historic building."

"Tempelhof survived World War II, it kept Berliners fed during the Soviet blockade of the city, but the authorities want to get rid of it. I can't understand it. It's a political decision which doesn't make any sense," he says.

On Sunday, Berliners will be able to give their verdict on the planned closure of Tempelhof airport. The referendum has become such a divisive issue that a big turnout is expected.

The city government is intent on shutting down the iconic airport, regardless of what the people want and are already publicly dismissing the voter's wishes. It's funny how soon they forget, isn't it? Tempelhof helped make sure that citizens of Berlin kept their right to choose for themselves during the Cold War.

Post war Germany was divided into three sections–the Allied part was controlled by the United States, Great Britain and France and other part by the Soviet Union. The city of Berlin, although located in the eastern Soviet half, was also divided into four sectors –West Berlin occupied by Allied interests and East Berlin occupied by Soviets. In June 1948, the Soviet Union attempted to control all of Berlin by cutting surface traffic to and from the city of West Berlin. Starving out the population and cutting off their business was their method of gaining control. The Truman administration reacted with a continual daily airlift which brought much needed food and supplies into the city of West Berlin. This Airbridge to Berlin lasted until the end of September of 1949—although on May 12, 1949, the Soviet government yielded and lifted the blockade.

When asked whether an airlift was even possible, General Curtis LeMay replied, "We can haul anything." And they did. Pilot Gail Halvorsen even made sure that candy and chewing gum for the children of Berlin were part of the effort.

The (Rail) Road Less Traveled

Bill Thomas writes an article for the Washington Post today about an unusual hobby that he and A. L. Freed have been practicing for the last decade or so. That would be following old railroad right of ways in their travels. They have done this all across the country, the most recent outing in Texas.

My friend A.L. Freed is behind the wheel. I've been speaking at his public policy seminars since the early 1990s, and for the past decade have navigated our occasional out-of-town business trips, although "business" may be the wrong word, because the trips themselves are purely for fun, an excuse to forget about work for a few days and hit the road. On the first one, we drove a Land Rover from Omaha through the Sand Hills of northern Nebraska to a seminar in Denver, following railroad tracks the whole time. After that, whenever a program is scheduled outside of Washington, we fly part of the way then drive the rest along whatever train tracks we can find, some of which haven't seen a train in years.

Normally the shortest distance between two points would be a straight line, but dotted lines are what we always look for. On railroad maps, dotted lines indicate abandoned tracks, often just mounds of overgrown dirt where tracks used to be, and those can lead to some fairly incredible places.

A.L. and I had been talking about the Texas trip for weeks. Our ultimate destination is a Capitol Hill workshop for government scientists in Las Cruces, N.M., roughly a five-hour plane trip from Washington. But getting there in a hurry — or even knowing how to get there — isn't the idea.

IT'S EARLY FEBRUARY, and we're tooling along Fort Worth & Western tracks going to Brownwood, Tex., 150 miles southwest of Dallas. A.L., a former pro on the North American rally circuit, likes to drive, which is fine with me. In 10 years of traveling together, he's compiled an impressive record: no wrecks; only one speeding ticket; and we've never been stuck in the mud. After a recent trip through the Mississippi Delta, fishtailing over rain-soaked farm roads, we returned our car caked with dirt and debris.

"Where've you all been with this?" asked the rental agent.

"A White House seminar," A.L. said.

Many of the old right of ways have disappeared in recent years, some turned into bike trails, some used for other purposes. But Thomas and Freed have found enough still there to travel some unusual paths to places few people go these days.

“She Won’t Think Anything About It.”

According to Wikipedia, those words, spoken in reply to the question, ""What will Miss Harris think of my hanging on to you so?" asked by Mary Todd Lincoln, were the last words of Abraham Lincoln. Shortly thereafter, John Wilkes Booth shot Lincoln in the back of the head at Ford's Theater in Washington, DC. The date was April 14, 1865, just after 9 PM. Abraham Lincoln would die the next morning at 7:22 AM, laid diagonally across a boarding house bed across the street from Ford's Theater. He was too tall a man to lie in the bed normally.

Somehow, it seems fitting that Lincoln's last official act as President of the United States was to pardon a man who had been convicted three times of spying for the Confederacy and sentenced to death.

Now, as then, he belongs to the ages.

April 9

On this day in 1865, the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia under command of Robert E. Lee surrendered. The surrender took place at the home of Wilmer and Virginia McLean in Appomattox Courthouse, Virginia. Union commander Ulysses S. Grant refused to change the written terms of the agreement he offered to Lee, but verbally allowed a change that let the men under Lee's command claim a horse or mule from the Confederate Army to take home with them. The full correspondence between the two men can be read here.

Seventy-seven years later, another, different surrender occurred. American forces defending the Bataan Peninsula in the Philippines surrendered on April 9, 1942. The surrendered forces were then marched out under brutal conditions. Japanese general Homma was executed in 1946 over what is now known as the Bataan Death March. 

Bloody Shiloh

On this day in 1862, the first day of the battle of Shiloh (or Pittsburg Landing) saw a tremendous defensive effort by Union troops under the command of Brigadier Generals Benjamin M. Prentiss and W.H.L. Wallace in what became known as The Hornet's Nest. For seven long hours the Union troops stood their ground, giving the rest of the Union forces time to stabilize their defense positions under massed artillery at Pittsburg Landing. The next day, the Union forces under Ulysses S. Grant counterattacked all along the line, driving the Confederate forces from the field. I posted about this last year and Crosspatch provided a link to Grant's autobiography. 

The Confederate assaults were made with such a disregard of losses on their own side that our line of tents soon fell into their hands. The ground on which the battle was fought was undulating, heavily timbered with scattered clearings, the woods giving some protection to the troops on both sides. There was also considerable underbrush. A number of attempts were made by the enemy to turn our right flank, where Sherman was posted, but every effort was repulsed with heavy loss. But the front attack was kept up so vigorously that, to prevent the success of these attempts to get on our flanks, the National troops were compelled, several times, to take positions to the rear nearer Pittsburg landing. When the firing ceased at night the National line was all of a mile in rear of the position it had occupied in the morning.     

In one of the backward moves, on the 6th, the division commanded by General Prentiss did not fall back with the others. This left his flanks exposed and enabled the enemy to capture him with about 2,200 of his officers and men. General Badeau gives four o’clock of the 6th as about the time this capture took place. He may be right as to the time, but my recollection is that the hour was later. General Prentiss himself gave the hour as half-past five. I was with him, as I was with each of the division commanders that day, several times, and my recollection is that the last time I was with him was about half-past four, when his division was standing up firmly and the General was as cool as if expecting victory. But no matter whether it was four or later, the story that he and his command were surprised and captured in their camps is without any foundation whatever. If it had been true, as currently reported at the time and yet believed by thousands of people, that Prentiss and his division had been captured in their beds, there would not have been an all-day struggle, with the loss of thousands killed and wounded on the Confederate side.     

With the single exception of a few minutes after the capture of Prentiss, a continuous and unbroken line was maintained all day from Snake Creek or its tributaries on the right to Lick Creek or the Tennessee on the left above Pittsburg. There was no hour during the day when there was not heavy firing and generally hard fighting at some point on the line, but seldom at all points at the same time. It was a case of Southern dash against Northern pluck and endurance. Three of the five divisions engaged on Sunday were entirely raw, and many of the men had only received their arms on the way from their States to the field. Many of them had arrived but a day or two before and were hardly able to load their muskets according to the manual. Their officers were equally ignorant of their duties. Under these circumstances it is not astonishing that many of the regiments broke at the first fire. In two cases, as I now remember, colonels led their regiments from the field on first hearing the whistle of the enemy’s bullets. In these cases the colonels were constitutional cowards, unfit for any military position; but not so the officers and men led out of danger by them. Better troops never went upon a battle-field than many of these, officers and men, afterwards proved themselves to be, who fled panic stricken at the first whistle of bullets and shell at Shiloh.

24,000 casualties were recorded in the two days of Shiloh. Wikipedia details the Union casualties as 13,047: 1,754 killed, 8,408 wounded, 2,885 captured/missing.

HMAS Sydney Located

Searchers have finally located the wreck of the Australian cruiser HMAS Sydney that sunk after a battle with a German commerce raider during World War Two. The Sydney sank with all hands after the fierce battle. The German Kormoran was heavily damaged and later scuttled. The discovery of the wreck has still not answered why the Sydney sank so rapidly.

Searchers last month found the wreck of the HMAS Sydney, which sank with the loss of all 645 crew in November 1941 after a 30-minute battle with the German merchant raider HSK Kormoran, but details of why the ship sank so quickly remain a mystery.

The Australian government has set up an inquiry to try to find out why no sailors survived, but images of the wreck reinforce suggestions the Sydney was heavily damaged by German shelling during the first salvos of their battle.

"The incredible photos of the underwater wreckage bring home how fierce the battle must have been," Australia's Defence Science and Personnel Minister Warren Snowdon said in a statement.

The Australian reports that the Sydney's lifeboats appear to be missing, deepening the mystery of what happened. 

They show all Sydney's lifeboats missing, suggesting sailors may have escaped the sinking warship to an unknown fate.

Coloured a deep shade of blue by the Indian Ocean, photos taken 2.5kms down by a remotely-operated submersible vehicle (ROV), and released today by the Finding Sydney Foundation, clearly show the damage inflicted on the Sydney.

The foundation says both funnels and masts are gone, shell holes have punched neatly through gun turrets, the bow is completely missing and there is “severe punishment” to the bridge and superstructure, which were known to have been targeted by the Kormoran's guns.

The peeling back of the ship's side in one area could have been the result of a torpedo strike from the Kormoran, says observer and naval historian John Perryman.

More from the Finding Sydney Foundation website.  645 Australian sailors were lost as a result of the sinking of the Sydney. More than 300 Germans from the Kormoran survived the battle.

Hanoi Jane Picks A Candidate

Jane Fonda has endorsed - or at least said that she is voting for, Barack Obama. 

Less examined is whether some celebrity endorsements may actually cost a candidate votes. This could be one of those less desirable votes for part of the country, especially if Obama was hoping to attract some crossover Republicans if he's the Democratic candidate come fall.

Obama, who was recently named the most liberal member of the Senate by the nonpartisan National Journal, has sought to portray himself as the earliest anti-Iraq war opponent and tagged his sole remaining opponent, Sen. Hillary Clinton, with voting to authorize the use of force in Iraq.

The problem for those of a certain generation that endured the Vietnam War and the sometimes violent domestic conflict that accompanied it at home is that during Fonda's controversial wartime visit to North Vietnam, she was photographed at a Communist anti-aircraft gun battery.

According to the photo caption distributed at the time, she joined North Vietnamese soldiers there in singing an antiwar song while preparing to shoot at attacking Americans.

Fonda, of course, did so much more than just sit at the battery. She was also part and parcel of the North Vietnamese propaganda machine - a willing participant to that. More importantly, after the POWs began returning, she denied they had been tortured:

During this visit she also visited American prisoners of war (POWs), and brought back messages from them to their families. When cases of torture began to emerge among POWs returning to the United States, Fonda called the returning POWs "hypocrites and liars."[14] She added, "These were not men who had been tortured. These were not men who had been starved. These were not men who had been brainwashed." On the subject of torture in general, Fonda told The New York Times in 1973, "I'm quite sure that there were incidents of torture… but the pilots who were saying it was the policy of the Vietnamese and that it was systematic, I believe that's a lie." Several American POWs and other eyewitnesses, including former POW, and future US Senator and Republican presidential candidate, John McCain, disagree with this sentiment.

Yes, I imagine John McCain does disagree with her assessment. He bears the scars to this day of the torture Hanoi Jane denied. Do I think this will be a huge blow to Obama? No, of course not. Do I believe it will make even a few people more likely not to vote for him? Probably. There are some of us who do remember Hanoi Jane's antics during the war. And we still do not forgive her.  

Today’s Historical Note

On this day in 1513, the Spanish explorer Juan Ponce de Leon landed in Florida. This is the first recorded instance of what has come to be called "Spring Break" or "The Fountain of Youths."