Travis is turning Red.

We have word from Travis County GOP headquarters that early voting, here in Travis, is currently running about 40 percent higher in the Republican primary than in the Democratic primary. What's more remarkable is that for years Democrats have outnumbered Republicans in Travis about two-to-one. At least, they did outnumber us. Until now.

Turnout in the primary is also on track to meet or exceed the turnout of the 2008 primary. In Texas, it’s highly unusual for primary turnout in a gubernatorial year to exceed that of a presidential year. It’s a testament, in large part, to how big a tent the Republican Party has become. Just look at our lineup of gubernatorial candidates: there’s considerable difference from Kay to Rick to Debra. I’m a Perry supporter, myself, but I’ll enthusiastically back whoever wins on Tuesday. There are things to like about all of them.

So, things could be a little crazy on Tuesday. I recommend that every vote early—today, the last day of early voting, if that’s at all possible. If I were a Cook County (Illinois) Democrat, I’d recommend voting often too, but we don’t do that sort of thing down here.

In short, folks, Travis is turning Red, or at least purple. The One Party State is coming to an end, competitive politics is returning, and Austin will not be Singapore for long. My work is not done here, but we’re all making great progress.

Leave it to the Democrats to kill the feds' AAA rating.

It’s commonly known by now that Moody’s, the bond rating agency, issued last week a warning regarding the US federal government’s debt. The reports read in part:

        Unless further measures are taken to reduce the budget deficit further or the economy rebounds more vigorously than expected, the federal financial picture as presented in the projections for the next decade will at some point put pressure on the triple A government bond rating.

Or, in plain English, The crazy borrowing of the Obamanistas is unsustainable, and they have their heads in the sand about it. Most deeply buried may be that of Timothy Geithner, the federal treasury secretary. As reported by the Wall Street Journal, when asked on ABC News’s This Week about the prospects of the US losing its AAA rating, he simply said,

        Absolutely not. That will never happen to this country.

How reassuring. At least Mr. Geithner has convincingly Wall Street hair. He further said that the Obama administration was “deeply serious” about deficit reduction. Serious? Really? How about deficit elimination? How about deeply cutting runaway federal spending? How about cutting into income transfer programs? How about slashing away at the intergenerational theft of Social “Security”? If we heard more serious proposals than mere budget freezes, we might be able to take this crowd seriously.

Here in Texas, as some of my more statist friends might point out, we get a lot of our government funding direct from the federal government. Regrettably, we also have to endure mandates from the federal government to spend said money, and our people are still getting taxed for it from far-off Washington, so the effect isn’t as delightful as advertised. It’s part-and-parcel of the obscene largesse foisted upon us by the Washingtonian cabal.

Association with that crowd is offensive not just to Teapartiers and Ronpaulists, but increasingly to a large section of the electorate who doubt that every problem has a federal or international solution. It’s an offense to the basic conservative—and even classically liberal—principle of subsidiarity, and we should take every useful opportunity to tag local Democrats with it. Statism, whether enthused by Democrats or wobbly Republicans, got us into this mess. As we’re cleaning it up, we should be handing them the bill.

Hope and change. Rubbish. Hope is not a strategy. In short, if you supported this crowd, you have some explaining to do.

"With the retraction, the hypothesis that he put forward has been debunked"

I’m writing about vaccines again. Yes, vaccines—for the issue is both newsworthy and important to the party.

Yesterday, the British medical journal The Lancet announced its formal, full retraction of its infamous 1998 article, "Ileal-lymphoid-nodular hyperplasia, non-specific colitis, and pervasive-developmental disorder in children," by Andrew J. Wakefield, S.H. Murch, A. Anthony, et alia. The paper purported to find a link between the measles- mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccine and autism in young children; almost immediately, that tenuous finding was criticized in the pages of the same journal. As one correspondent from the County Durham Public Health Department in the UK wrote,

        This anecdotal reporting of a biased sample is poor science and has no place in a peer-reviewed journal... The anger of public health workers at this paper is not due to the challenge of public health dogma, as Wakefield suggests. It is because children are being put at risk from potentially lethal infectious diseases not by new reliable evidence but by media coverage of another badly designed study by this group.

It seems, after all, that Wakefield and his crew cherry-picked a sample of just twelve kids, and then drew blood from them at his son’s birthday party. That’s not exactly high science.

The Wall Street Journal’s story on this today is particularly revealing. In part, it notes that

        "the retraction of this paper doesn't mean that MMR doesn't cause autism and it's all a farce," said Wendy Fournier, president of the National Autism Association. It is "possible" that the MMR vaccine causes autism, she said, but "the science is not there in terms of the mechanism." The concern is that measles virus has been found in children's intestines after vaccination, said Ms. Fournier.

Fair enough, but as the WSJ quotes Greg Poland, professor of medicine and infectious diseases, and director of the vaccine research group at the Mayo Clinic,

        "With the retraction, the hypothesis that he put forward has been debunked"

That is, we also haven’t proven whether donuts and coffee might or might not cause autism either, but that doesn’t mean that one should avoid breakfast at Krispy Kreme. (Well, at least not for that reason.) In short, what Andrew Wakefield and his colleagues produced was over a decade of hysteria about a mythical danger, and that has endangered lives.

So, what does this have to do with the GOP in Travis County, Texas? As I’ve written before, there’s a dangerously anti-intellectual streak in the GOP today, and particularly in some factions that hang about the GOP here in Travis County. Whether it’s axe-grinding about the gold standard or something they call “world-class science standards,” the crankiness is particularly noisy. That’s bad for the unwanted attraction brought upon us by our vague and distant association with the weirder fringes of the movement, such as it is.

What’s particularly bad for us on this count is that Wakefield actually lives and works here in Austin. Proximity may account for the intensity of feeling locally about such a thoroughly debunked idea. His minions and strap-hangers may be whispering this stuff in the aisles at Whole Foods, but that doesn’t mean that we should continue to accord this viewpoint any prominence in our platforms or policies. The Lancet has moved on from this brief-but-inglorious episode in its history. The Travis County GOP needs to do so as well.