The Breakfast Meeting: At Last, Political Ads 24/7; and a Firing at Oxford American

By NOAM COHEN

With the influx of outside spending on campaign ads this year in many states, it can seem as if TV is wall-to-wall political advertising, but in Hawaii, Adam Nagourney reports, the Republican candidate for United States Senate is turning that vision into reality. Linda Lingle, a former two-term governor, pays $2,500 a week for channel 110 on the digital cable dial for LL12, where she airs speeches, her own ads and endorsements and video issue papers in 10 of the languages spoke on the islands. The channel, while a relatively high number, is ensconced between CNN Headline News and Fox News, so presumably gets a few politically interested channel surfers.

• As the Romney campaign weighs who should speak at the Republican National Committee, the fate of one Donald J. Trump sits in the balance, Jeremy W. Peters writes. So far, the campaign has allowed one opponent - Rick Santorum - to speak, and in granting a slot to Senator Ra nd Paul it has nodded to another opponent, his father, Representative Ron Paul. Newt Gingrich is getting his own “university,” workshops he will host outside of the convention, which begins Aug. 27 in Tampa, Fla. But Mr. Trump? No word yet, though he tells Mr. Peters that he may have a conflict that week, and would not want to overextend himself: “The Republican Party in Sarasota - you've probably heard of this - they're giving me the Statesman of the Year award.”

The loud new agora that is Facebook is getting new scrutiny. Some are attempting to apply the equivalent of earplugs to baby photos, Austin Considine writes, through a Chrome extension unbaby. me that helpfully replaces baby photos posted by oversharing new parents with images of cats, sunsets or bacon. More seriously, the American Civil Liberties Union and Facebook have filed amicus briefs in an appeal of a recent decision by a federal judge that “liking” something on Facebook isn't speech protected by the First Amendment, The Wall Street Journal reported. (The issue, The Journal reports, is whether it was legal for employees of a Virginia sheriff in a re-election campaign to be fired for “liking” the opponent's Web page on Facebook, among other things.)

The founder and longtime editor of The Oxford American - a magazine with quirky, intellectual writing intended to help revive the great Southern literary tradition - has been fired by its board of directors, Julie Bosman reports. The board says that the magazine was rife with sexual harassment under the editor, Marc Smirnoff, with his behavior at a July 4 overnight party at a mountain cabin serving as a catalyst for complaints. Mr. Smirnoff has begun an aggressive public counteroffensive, she writes, lashing out at the magazine and its board even as he acknowledged doing many of the things he was accused of - but being misunderstood - including hugging, patting and kissing interns on top of their hea ds.