'We Will Not be Hearing From Any Pimps or Prostitutes Today'

Well, maybe not the fake prostitute who've gotten them into their current mess, but the political prostitutes were out by the, um, dozens to support the criminal syndicate known as ACORN yesterday in Philadelphia. What an outpouring of support.

About 60 members and supporters of the community-action group ACORN gathered at a North Philadelphia church yesterday to sing the praises of the beleaguered organization.

"There are two ACORNs out there," said Ian Phillips, ACORN's Pennsylvania legislative director and one of the organizers of the event.

"We wanted to talk about the ACORN that people who live in the community know."

The 90-minute session, at the House of Prayer Episcopal Church on Limekiln Pike, was part pep rally, part revival meeting.

Speakers included State Rep. Mark Cohen, retired city labor leader Tom Cronin, city Consumer Affairs Director Lance Haver, and nearly a dozen organizers and city residents who work for or have benefited from ACORN's action.

In the midst of praising the organization, several speakers took aim at the "right-wing conservative" critics who they say have launched a campaign to smear ACORN.

"We will not be hearing from any pimps or prostitutes today," said ACORN's Junette Marcano, who served as moderator at the session.

Marcano was referring to the controversy around the organization after an independent filmmaker and a female companion posed as a pimp and a prostitute and visited several ACORN offices around the country seeking assistance to set up a brothel that they said would use underage girls smuggled from Central America.

Secretly recorded videos of several of the meetings were made public this month and have become fodder for what ACORN supporters say is an attack by conservative media.

Some cheese to go with that whine?

"The right wing in this country is going after the poor," said the former president of one of the city workers' unions.

Cohen (D., Phila.) called the smear campaign "outrageous" and said "wherever there are needs that ordinary people have, ACORN is there to help."

Keep deluding yourselves, folks.

Meanwhile, ACORN's head thug is still whining like a stuck pig.

"They [Congress] did it because Fox News and the right-wing smear machine told them to do it," she wrote.

In a statement to The Post Friday, Lewis defended her aggressive stance and said she remained fully committed to reforming the organization.

"But that doesn't mean we're prepared to stand by silently while the right wing exploits this situation to score political points," she added.

In a real howler today, the ombudsman for the antique media relic New York Times today points out the obvious: His paper wasn't just slow to cover this scandal, it was completely derelict in its duties because they were protecting one of the left's sacred cows.

But for days, as more videos were posted and government authorities rushed to distance themselves from Acorn, The Times stood still. Its slow reflexes — closely following its slow response to a controversy that forced the resignation of Van Jones, a White House adviser — suggested that it has trouble dealing with stories arising from the polemical world of talk radio, cable television and partisan blogs. Some stories, lacking facts, never catch fire. But others do, and a newspaper like The Times needs to be alert to them or wind up looking clueless or, worse, partisan itself.

Some editors told me they were not immediately aware of the Acorn videos on Fox, YouTube and a new conservative Web site called BigGovernment.com. When the Senate voted to cut off all federal funds to Acorn, there was not a word in the newspaper or on its Web site. When the New York City Council froze all its funding for Acorn and the Brooklyn district attorney opened a criminal investigation, there was still nothing.

Readers noticed. James Jeff Crocket of New Britain, Conn., spoke for many when he said he was sure he knew why the paper was silent: “protecting the progressive movement.”

Indeed they were. Which is why the NY Times has zero credibility.