HUFFINGTON POST: At last Tuesday’s Democratic debate, Sen. Hillary Clinton drew out her objections to Sen. Barack Obama‘s relationship with his former pastor Reverend Jeremiah Wright, saying that what troubled her was not just Wright’s incendiary language, but his past praise for Louis Farrakhan, the controversial head of the
Nation of Islam. “It is clear that, as leaders, we have a choice who we associate with and who we apparently give some kind of seal of approval to,” said Clinton. “And I think that it wasn’t only the specific remarks but some of the relationships with Reverend Farrakhan, with giving the church bulletin over to the leader of Hamas, to put a message in.” MORE
NEWSDAY: Given Rendell’s importance throughout the state, we feel a little negligent about never posting the video below, which shows him showering fulsome praise on Minister Louis Farrakhan, who had helped quell some disturbances in a Philadelphia neighborhood in 1997. It bubbled up near the end of the Clinton – Obama primary. 
Earlier in the campaign, at a debate in Ohio, Clinton famously demanded that Obama “denounce and reject” Farrakhan, because Farrakhan had said he favored Obama. In Pennsylvania, by contrast, she seemed quite comfortable taking support from a guy who not only hadn’t denounced Farrakhan but had praised him (watch the video) for the “decency of his soul” and the “strength of his courage.”
The praise was evidently triggered by Farrakhan‘s help in a particular situation, but after six weeks of watching Hillary piggyback around Pennsylvania on Rendell’s back like his little sister, her posture seems…. a little selective. Does she believe that only politicians who run against her need to denounce Farrakhan, while politicians who support her can praise him? Or does our progressive senator from NY who would never play the race card believe that half-black politicians have to denounce him, but white ones are under no such obligation? MORE
BBC: The Nation of Islam leader has been banned from Britain since 1986. Successive governments have refused him permission to visit.
WIKIPEDIA: Who Is Farrakhan?
1996: Ed Rendell On Minister Louis Farrakhan
ABC NEWS: In The Nation, former ’60s radical Tom Hayden — in an essay called “Why Hillary Makes My Wife Scream” — hammers Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-NY, for attacking Sen. Barack Obama, D-Illinois, for his association
with former Weather Underground member William Ayers. “Hillary is blind to her own roots in the sixties,” Hayden writes. “She was in Chicago for three nights during the 1968 street confrontations. She chaired the 1970 Yale law school meeting where students voted to join a national student strike again an ‘unconscionable expansion of a war that should never have been waged.’ She was involved in the New Haven defense of Bobby Seale during his murder trial in 1970, as the lead scheduler of student monitors. … She wrote that abused children were citizens with the same rights as their parents.
“Most significantly in terms of her recent attacks on Barack, after Yale law school, Hillary went to work for the left-wing Bay Area law firm of Treuhaft, Walker and Burnstein, which specialized in Black Panthers and West Coast labor leaders prosecuted for being communists. Two of the firm’s partners, according to Treuhaft, were communists and the two others ‘tolerated communists’. Then she went on to Washington to help impeach Richard Nixon, whose career was built on smearing and destroying the careers of people through vague insinuations about their backgrounds and associates. …MORE