The Phantom Trip to NYC

The former and current Daschle staffers have been claiming Senator Thune went to NY City last week for a blogger conference, which is untrue.  One e-mail to the conference organizers makes clear that Thune turned down a request to speak:

Dear South Dakota Politics team:

My name is Elizabeth Caputo and I am the Marketing Director for the Personal Democracy Forum (www.personaldemocracy.com).

For our conference this year, we invited Senator Thune to speak, as well as several other elected officials, including Senator Jon Corzine, Senator Barack Obama, Congressman Tom Tancredo, and Congresswoman Katherine Harris.

We sent our invitation letters out in March and early April, and heard back from Senator Thune's office, via two conversations with Summer Pitlick, in late April that he would NOT be able to attend.

At no point did we at PDF include Senator Thune as a confirmed speaker in any of our promotional materials,press releases, or anywhere on our website.

We understand that one or more sponsoring organizations of our conference may have distributed press releases, and believe that this may be the source of the confusion. If you have further questions, please feel free to contact me or PDF's Executive Editor, Micah Sifry (917----), or any of the companies who sent out the errant information.

Thank you for your understanding and again, we apologize for any confusion.

Elizabeth Caputo

Marketing Director

Personal Democracy Forum

www.personaldemocracy.com