In perusing the news today, there are a couple columns of note. I don’t often agree with Maureen Dowd and her brand of snark, but her piece today – The Lady and the Tiger – is pretty well done. She astutely examines how Tiger Woods and White House social maven Desiree Rogers have both failed in their public relations responses to their respective crises. This graph sums it up –

They presumptuously put themselves beyond authority and, despite all the public relations support on earth, broke the first rule of scandal: Don’t stonewall. Admit your mistake before others piece together the embarrassing facts. Reflexive clampdowns don’t work in an era when privacy is passé and when some media outlets are out there giving cash incentives for true confessions and fake reality.

From the other side of the political spectrum, in his column “The climate-change travesty,” the erudite George Will examines the real agendas and controvery swirling around the upcoming climate conference in Copenhagen. The normally staid Will also uses a standard web/text manner of writing to poke an ozone-layer sized hole in President Obama’s promise of action in this graph:

Barack Obama, understanding the histrionics required in climate-change debates, promises that U.S. emissions in 2050 will be 83 percent below 2005 levels. If so, 2050 emissions will equal those in 1910, when there were 92 million Americans. But there will be 420 million Americans in 2050, so Obama’s promise means that per capita emissions then will be about what they were in 1875. That. Will. Not. Happen.

Happy reading, my friends.