Bad Attitudes has just hired, at the usual rates, a chief European correspondent. She is Jennie Erin Smith, a Florida journalist and author currently expatriated to Germany. Here is her first report from the dark heart of Sozialismus.

I left Germany for a month to attend to some business at home, and when I came back, ten days ago, it seemed more time had passed than I’d realized. The hills around St. Wendel, formerly wet and green, had dried to an ugly yellow, the whole landscape cocooned by an unfamiliar dry heat.

The one change I had eagerly anticipated, and was flabbergasted not to see any evidence of, was the end of a dubious excavation in front of my apartment. That minor project – the ripping up of about a quarter mile of street, changing out some pipes, and replacing a perfectly workable asphalt sidewalk with a decorative, woven-looking pattern of cement bricks, began in the spring, after the German government’s 50 billion Euros worth of stimulus really started flowing, and they flowed a good deal faster here than back home, though no one here has any real idea how all this will be paid for, either.

So every morning at 7 a.m. and no later the publicly funded jackhammers start, and though the heat is mild enough in St. Wendel that no one even bothers with air-conditioning, the work is over by about noon, when the guys sit around the tables outside the bakery looking very satisfied with themselves. This has something to do with Kurzarbeit, the shortened-workday program meant to keep unemployment from rising. There is no obvious reason this particular project couldn’t start later in the day, sparing us a lot of misery, but this is how it’s done.

My downstairs neighbor, a retired diplomat named Mertens, is far more pissed off than I am about the interminable project, because it’s his taxes. He goes to all the council meetings and said no one had ever mentioned the necessity of the decorative sidewalk until the stimulus. Every afternoon, when the equipment lies about dormant and unprotected, he walks the site with a serious expression, as though surveying casualties on a battlefield. “This — waste!” he yelled up to my window yesterday. “They will never finish. Never. Not for months.”

Angela Merkel and her fellow Christian Democrats were pissed off this week, too, by Vera Lengsfeld, a blonde, middle-aged CDU politician running for a seat representing Kreuzberg, a very left-wing Berlin district where Lengsfeld stands no chance in September.

A desperate Lengsfeld decided to use her melons to get votes, which would have been fine had she stopped there, but then she co-opted the Chancellor’s melons, too. The Lengsfeld campaign poster showed both women in low-cut evening dresses — Merkel’s rather striking photo was snapped at an opera last year. “We have more to offer” was Lengsfeld’s tag line (see below). This is how the German equivalent of Republicans behave.

“German economy unexpectedly grows in second quarter” was this morning’s headline, all over the place.