The reaction to Number 10’s Clarkson video is an interesting example of the no-win situation for Governments in trying to vary the ways in which they interact with people.

For those who hadn’t seen it, there was a petition on the Downing Street site to ‘make Jeremy Clarkson Prime Minister’. This was, as you can tell, a joke petition (or put forward by someone without much knowledge of the British constitution).

So Number 10 put forward a joke response on YouTube - nothing extravagant, just some stock footage banged together in iMovie or something similar. It’s not going to win the Golden Rose of Montreux, but it’s a jokey response to a jokey petition. Fair enough for a slow August, you might think.

But what is the media story? An attack on the Government by the opposition, for ‘wasting public money’ on producing the response.

No wonder Governments get nervy and defensive about new methods of communications.

I’m in New York at the moment - and, though I haven’t been watching TV much, I’ve caught a couple of campaign ads.

I’m also enjoying the paper version of the New York Times - although all the content is online, I’m still enough of a fogey to prefer dead tree for reading on the subway.

Yesterday’s edition had two interesting articles on how US TV is trying to handle young and engaged voters.

Here’s an article on how the networks are trying to reach young people who don’t watch the evening news (average viewer age: 60+) but are still interested in politics.

Meanwhile, SaysMe.tv is offering people 25-second “my say” slots on cable for $6 and up. Not sure how that interplays with what political advertising rules there are in the US.

A republic, if you can keep it. BBC.

An article, via Paulie.

I’m in Washington DC today and tomorrow, and wandering round the Federal Triangle (think Whitehall with even more stern neo-classicism) I was amused by the fact that all the Government buildings seem to have self-justificatory quotations carved over the doorways - the commerce building had something about the importance of regulated trade, the Justice Department something about the glory that justice brings to the world. Even the Internal Revenue Service had a quotation from Oliver Wendell Holmes over the door: something about taxation being the price we pay for a civilised society.

I’m not sure whether it’s done in a triumphalist spirit, or to make the case for Government, but even though the bleak monumentalism of the buildings is quite late British Empire, the sentiments carved into them make for a different feel. It’s as if the relation between state and citizen is based on a deal or an arrangement, more so than in the UK Government’s communications - where the presence of the Royal crest implies a much older, much less rational relationship.

Compare also the Royal crest and the French Republic’s logo - easily the best and most consistent Governmental branding.

The New York Times has an interesting article, talking about the wave of political attack books in the US in advance of the general election, with a particular focus on a new anti-Obama diatribe.

Number 10 has revamped their website, according to The Register.

The Joint [Lords and Commons] Committee on Human Rights has, reports the BBC, called for the Government to bring forward a new Bill of Rights (an issue that is currently out for consultation). The Bill, which would extend the existing Human Rights Act and European Convention, could include rights such as the right to trial by jury and various additional rights for vulnerable groups.

I’m not sure there’s a lot to be gained from adding to the existing rights in the Human Rights Act/European Convention, which are broadly drawn. (It should be noted that the Conservatives are apparently proposing that the new Bill would replace rather than supplement the HRA).

Human Rights is a powerful term, and I think it’s risky to overload it with lots of new soft rights like the right to work. These sorts of rights are hard to define and enforce, and are in some constitutions even have the rider ‘as far as the state can reasonably afford’. I worry that the non-absolute nature of these additional rights could pollute already established rights, and imply that budgetary constraints are a factor there too: a right to housing has to be ‘within reasonable budgetary constraints’; the right to free speech should never be.

One can put in safeguards to ensure that this doesn’t happen - say, by making some of the rights non-justiciable - but this leads to two bad endings. Either judges find ways round the safeguards and start making decisions that are properly the work of other branches of government; or there are two different sorts of rights - ‘real’ ones like freedom of speech and assembly, and ‘pretend ones’ like the socio-economic rights.

John McCain’s presidential campaign has started a programme whereby supporters are rewarded with loyalty points for posting positive commentary on various blogs and political websites. The points can be redeemed for McCain merchandise and books. The current featured sites include both left-leaning blog Daily Kos, and the right-leaning Red State.

This move is both depressing and entirely predictable. If you have an army of fired-up activists, what could be easier than getting them to push your message on the internet? Not only is it cheap labour and free advertising, the commenters may well be taken for regular Joes or Joannas, giving them much more credibility than a politician or a campaign staffer.

The payment angle feels a little more sordid. The participants in the scheme are almost certainly going to be McCain supporters already, so maybe the benefits won’t make much difference, but the reward element has an unpleasant odour of buying opinions for cash, or at least a signed copy of Faith of My Fathers. I appreciate that this may be a rather British view, given the fuss that paying MPs cash to ask questions caused in the 1990s.

Whatever the moral pros and cons, in starting this off, Sen. McCain has driven another nail into the coffin of emergent democracy - the idea that a representative popular will could arise, cloud-like, from the blogs and comments on websites. With enough cash and enough motivated people, the tenor of the comments can be whatever you like.

What’s more, he has dented the credibility of anyone supporting him in an internet discussion - the obvious rejoinder is “how much are you getting for this comment?” or “what’s in this for you?”. Could this be the first lurch downhill for public credibility of the public?

Something is happening in Georgia that looks a lot like war.

Georgia elected their president in January, and Russia elected theirs in March. So is this another blow to Democratic Peace Theory? Or does one or other of the combatants (or the South Ossetian government) not qualify as a democracy?