To pass a comment is difficult, when others don’t provoke it, so from my point of view it was a dull month for the German corner. But if I would have to award a prize, it would have to go to the conservative Christian Social Union of Bavaria, which is the only federal state without a branch of Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union.

It’s chairman uttered some nice sound bites during the yearly party conference like “an absolute market is a perverse economy, an absolute market is madness”. Whether he believes it himself or whether he only wanted to appease the strong anti-rescue wing of his party is unknown, however the loyal minister of transport needed his help to be elected into the executive committee.

Anyway they voted for the European rescue umbrella in rare unity with the coalition partners, only to let the announcement of Merkel’s finance and economy minister collapse, that there will be tax reductions before the next election, leaving the coalition in disarray again.

Well, everybody wants to be elected, thus it is likely that he needed some leverage for his colleague’s plan to introduce a toll on German motorways. And help he needs, our transport minister, Mr. Ramsauer, who figured in this column before. He contributed to this month’s prize for his party by defying logic again: he threatens cyclists to make it a legal requirement to wear a helmet, if the current number of 10% does not rise to 50%.

Let’s hope the number will rise, this way he would be busy sorting out who is allowed to cycle without a helmet, preventing him from uttering further nonsense. If there is a need for action, it must be taken for everyone’s sake.

Surprisingly, few public waves were created by the exposure of a government used Trojan by the Chaos Computer Club. That data are irresistible shows the case of Facebook which accumulated 1200 pages of information on an Austrian student over the course of 3 years. He created this information by writing on his page, modifying it and communicating with others – in other words every move was stored.

That government are something different and that online surveillance is necessary is obvious, but this time it demonstrated the lack of surveillance of federal states and central states agencies, which interpreted the law according to convenience rather than facts. It is not reassuring to load spyware onto a computer which can copy the whole volume of data, modify software and activate cameras and microphones and it is not reassuring that nobody seems to know who has done what.

October is also the month when a flood of data of the census bureau is being published. This makes good reading. (We Germans will die out! The only problem is that you won’t live to see it.) Out of the sheer number of figures the most notables are that the economic growth will slow down after it had peaked in the 1st quarter of 2011. This will mean less revenue. In this context it is interesting to note that the expenditure of the public budgets in 2010 topped the revenue by 78 billion Euros.

Look who is talking! It is the government that ordered constitutionally enshrined debt breaks to the Euro member states. May be stopping tax reductions in an election year is not the worst move after all?