Direct Connection…
And finally (for now) on the comic theme…
(with thanks to Bill G., who emails your correspondent almost every day)
As we listen wisely but not too well, we might (or might not) raise a banner for the thirteenth President of the U.S., Millard Fillmore, born on this date in 1800. Fillmore was the second V.P. to assume the presidency between elections (in his case, following the death of Zachary Taylor in 1850), and was never actually elected to office. Following his serve-out of Taylor’s term, Fillmore failed to get his own party’s, the Whig’s, nomination for the Presidency in the 1852 election. By the 1856 election, the Whigs had pretty much fallen apart. Fillmore refused to follow Lincoln and others into the new Republican Party; instead he sought and got the nomination of the American Party, the anti-immigrant, anti-Catholic arm of the Know-Nothing Party. He finished third in the general election, behind James Buchanan and John Fremont.
