The Breakfast Meeting: Isaac Still Stealing the Show, and Signs of Apple v. Google

By NOAM COHEN

Tropical Storm Isaac on Tuesday was fast becoming a hurricane, with landfall expected Tuesday evening along the Mississippi and Louisiana coastlines, Campbell Robertson reported, with officials warning that the greatest danger could be from flooding, rather than the winds. For now, the networks were leaving their anchors 700 miles away in Tampa to cover the Republican National Convention, Jeremy W. Peters reported. Still the networks said they were being flexible in their planning; for example, NBC said it was prepared to send Brian Williams to New Orleans if the storm strengthened to a strong Category 2 or 3 hurricane.

• The Republican convention may have been postponed, in deference to Isaac, which had been thought to be heading toward Tampa, but the media coverage continued, Alessandra Stanley writes. The reporters and anchors in skyboxes didn't have any convention activities to cover, so their comments frequently went to a storm that took almost the exact same path on almost the exact day seven years ago: Hurricane Katrina.
• While the storm has certainly complicated the Republicans' planning, it also raises questions for President Obama's re-election campaign, Michael D. Shear writes. The Obama campaign had planned an aggressive posture in response to Mitt Romney's official nomination, but, depending on the severity of the storm, such partisanship could come off badly.
• On his daily radio show, Rush Limbaugh focused in on the initial model projections that showed Tropical Storm Isaac as likely to strike Tampa, Politico reported. He insisted that he wasn't saying there was a conspiracy, but on Monday he noted that the projections had cast a pall on the proceedings even before they had started: “I'm not alleging conspiracies here. The Hurricane center is the regime; the Hurricane center is the Commerce Department. It's the government. It's Obama.”

For all the sig nificance of Apple's courtroom victory over Samsung, which led to a jury's $1 billion damage award for patent infringement, an even larger fight could be looming, Claire Cain Miller and Brian X. Chen report: Apple v. Google. The Samsung products that Apple challenged use Google's Android software, and as Google begins to develop its own hardware, it will potentially face the same kinds of allegations unless it makes important modifications in design. In the background are comments made by Steven P. Jobs to his biographer, Walter Isaacson, about Android, calling it a “stolen product,” and adding, “I'm willing to go thermonuclear war on this.”

• On Monday Apple asked a federal judge to order eight Samsung products pulled off the shelves, in light of its courtroom victory. However, experts said that it was unlikely that a judge would grant the request.