1)  Technically, by directing people to a link where the talking points are listed is getting the talking points out.  I conceded the issue to you out of graciousness.

2)  Romney's donation as "loan" origin is inconsequential from a dollars and cents view when it comes to how much a candidate has in their war chest for spending.  Money in the bank is money to be spent on the campaign.  Parse it any way you want, Romney has approximately ten million dollars more than Paul and that amount goes a lot farther than Paul's.

3)  Paul is in fourth place in the money game, not third, according to your link.  You avoid admitting error yet so clearly revel in pointing out others.  Man up, Sarcasmo.

4)  I could care less if Paul has a 100 million dollar war chest and military personnel, past or present, donating to his campaign.  Never said to the contrary.  I'll bet you that all the candidates have military personnel donate to them.  Donor identification as military personnel was subject to the whim of the donator to be identified as such.  This capricious statistic was about as unscientific as it gets without being laughed at outright.

5)  I now see where the military donors are listed under Paul's contributors.  You were correct.  I was being intellectually lazy, as you put it, not drilling down three links and scrolling down a long page to count up various and ungrouped donors fitting the description of military.  How would like it if I gave you a link in which my supportive evidence was buried several links in from the original?  The cat and mouse game is a time waster and borders on the disingenuous.  I asked for the specific and you gave me the general (actually you parroted the identical link).

6)  I wasn't aware our discussion included everyone else on the forum.  What other poster's have done is irrelevant to what you or I do in this instance.  Your frequent Ron Paul Emergency Broadcast System announcements, replete with delusions of everyone and their brother out to get you and Paul, are hyperbolic, obsessive and tiresome.  That is a form of spam.  It also acts as a deterrent for me to be further interested in Paul.

Despite your constant nagging, I decided to give Paul a fair shake and read a few links about the man.  Paul seems like a decent enough person with some good ideas.  I've already said he seems personable and would probably enjoy spending time conversing with him.  Even so, I find it dishonest that he does not run under the Libertarian moniker since he surely is one.  His reasoning for disguising himself as a Republican in order to gain power is wrong at its core though understandable in the context of his ambitions.   I disagree with his stance on the Iraq war.  I disagree with some of his stance on what he calls American Independence and Sovereignty.  I don't care for isolationalistic politics as I reckon it not to be a realistic understanding of the modern world.  I also disagree with several of his Privacy and Personal Liberty talking points.

Yet I do agree with a variety of his other talking points on his web page and on Wikipedia, but, the Devil is in the details and I'm not hearing the details.  For instance, he talks about property rights of individuals as the foundation of a free society, yet he also speaks of city's using eminent domain to obtain private individual's property "without paying “just compensation.” "  This seems a little wishy washy to me.  Is eminent domain reasonable if the individual is compensated "justly"?  What does "just compensation" mean?  Either individual property rights are to be observed or they are not.  He seems to be hedging his bets on this.

I look forward to seeing Paul in the debates.  I hope they are on free broadcast tv as I don't have cable or satellite.  My mind is not made up yet.  My comments about Fred Thompson are not as my chosen "golden child" but from a consideration of his popularity despite being undeclared in a group of less than thoroughbred contenders as a snapshot of the race today.  Barring major mishaps, for better or worse, my prediction is he will be the Republican candidate (if he enters the race).  Same goes for Hilary Clinton on the Democrat side.

Still, there is much time remaining and many a misstep can be made.