Maria: Book never came up

Maria Shriver tells the New York Daily News' Lloyd Grove that she had no contact with anyone at NBC about the Schwarzenegger biography by Laurence Leamer. "It never came up, I never talked to anybody at NBC, nobody at NBC ever asked me, I never said anything to anybody at NBC," Shriver told the gossip columnist. Here's my earlier post.

Elsewhere on the Schwarzenegger beat: The governor will give next Tuesday's commencement address at Santa Monica College, and groups on the left are mobilizing a counter-rally. And a story in last Sunday's L.A. Times disclosed some secrets of Schwarzenegger's political operation, including the existence of a special phone number where big donors can call in to hear high-level talks about tactics and a strategy by advisers to whip up a "phenomenon of anger" among voters toward public employee unions.