Someone registered UncleanSweep.com in response to the PA Clean Sweep movement that's afoot.
For those not in Pennsylvania, last summer the lawmakers in the middle of the night voted to give themselves large pay raises in the form of what's called "Unvouchered Expenses", which amount to them going to the treasury like a teenager going to mom and dad and saying "I need another $1000 to buy some new jeans" and the state not requiring any proof what the money was used for.
Worse yet, the Commonwealth's Supreme Court declared the matter Constitutional under the PA Constitution, so journalists found their balls and started complaining and so did the people. Pretty soon the lawmakers vowed to give back their payraises, and then a Supreme Court Judge was voted out of office and suddenly the lawmakers passed a new bill repealing the pay raises. All fine and dandy but the anger hasn't really subsided.
PA Clean Sweep is the largest of the active citizen organizations working to start voting out incumbents in Harrisburg and replace them. Now I certainly do support getting some new people in Harrisburg, and shaking things up, and I think that PA Clean Sweep's activities are noble and good in the sense that they're keeping lawmaker's feet to the fire for doing something really eggregious, but I'm not active in PA Clean Sweep.
I do think that UncleanSweep's attempt to attack Russ Diamond, the guy in charge of PA Clean Sweep, comparing him to Enron Executives, and defaming him is pretty despicable. Especially given that on one page the owner of UncleanSweep attacks one of the candidates endorsed by PA Clean Sweep for making ad hominem attacks against Bush while making the same fallacy against Diamond.
The fact of the matter is, the site seems to be run by someone disgruntled with PACleanSweep and probably disgruntled with Diamond personally, and he's set up this site not as an attempt at good civic duty, but in an attempt to shame Russ Diamond.
I feel that that's a shame, because if there's something we should do, it's focus on making real reform happen in both Harrisburg and in Washington DC. If Russ did take money illegally from PA Clean Sweep then he should answer to that charge, but otherwise, this site is nothing more than a distraction and an unnecessary one at that.
