Don Michak finds Dan Gerstein and Tammy Sun running away - fast - from any association with mega-GOP fundraisers and energy industry lobbyists Tom Kuhn and Rick Shelby who according to Robert Novak hosted a $400,000 fundraiser for Sen. Lieberman last week in D.C.:

A Lieberman campaign spokeswoman, Tammy Sun, had told the Journal Inquirer that the fundraiser - which she said netted the three-term incumbent $400,000 - was organized by the campaign itself and had no prominent sponsors.

But Novak says its sponsors included Tom Kuhn, a close friend and college roommate of Bush, and Rick Shelby, a longtime Republican operative and executive, "who pressed fellow Republican lobbyists to pay a minimum of $1,000 a ticket."

Kuhn, the president of the Edison Electric Institute, an association of U.S. shareholder-owned electric companies, raised more than $100,000 for Bush in 2000 and 2004, according to Novak.

It depends on what the meaning of "hosted" is:

A top Lieberman campaign aide, Dan Gerstein, said today that he didn't know whether Novak was correct to identify Kuhn and Shelby as sponsors of the fundraiser.

"I don't know the terminology," he added, noting that certain individuals often are described as members of a "host committee" on invitations to such events.

Gerstein referred questions about the fundraiser to Sun, who stood by her previous statement.

"Novak is incorrect," she said. "There were no hosts, no sponsors or co-sponsors, no host committee, no names on the invitations. Everybody came as a guest, and it was a very bipartisan crowd with a lot of Democrats there as well as Republicans."