Funny thing that this article in the Baltimore Sun does not mention Fox News or Hannity.

ACORN, prostitution and tax evasion

Want to confirm all the negative impressions you may have gotten about ACORN from its many critics? Watch this video.

Yes, taped with a hidden camera, two Baltimore ACORN workers give advice to a man and a woman identifying themselves as a pimp and a prostitute on how to evade the authorities and cheat on their taxes, including how to claim 13 underage El Salvadoran sex slaves as dependents. At no point in the video do the ACORN workers bat an eyelash or give any impression that they find this unusual.

Once the video became public, ACORN promptly fired the two workers, though it's hard to know how seriously to take the organization's reaction. Baltimore ACORN board chairman Sonja Merchant-Jones told WJZ-TV that "We've investigated and we found nothing that they did to be illegal. Absolutely zero." Really? Advising someone to claim girls trafficked into the country illegally as sex workers as dependents on her tax returns?

At the end of the day, though, what does this prove? Certainly that these two ACORN workers displayed astonishing stupidity. But does it show that ACORN is as lawless as its critics contend? It's important to note that the two filmmakers, Hannah Giles and James O'Keefe, were turned away when they tried the same stunt in other cities. If they wanted to prove something about the organization as a whole, they might have tried a less salacious scenario. Of course, that would have been much less likely to rocket them to YouTube and Fox News stardom.

UPDATE: There's a second video out now of the same pair doing the same thing at the Washington ACORN office. In this case, the workers suggest a way that Ms. Giles could set up a phony business to conceal the nature of her earnings.

SECOND UPDATE: For those of you criticizing me for defending ACORN here, I'd like to say the existence of the second video has erased what little benefit of the doubt I was willing to extend before.