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Paul's ACU rating was 96 in 2010, 91 in 2009, and lifetime 83.5 is higher than John McCain's. That puts him very solidly in the Republican mainstream, and identifies him in the eyes of the ACU (and most sensible conservatives) as a -- GASP[!] -- conservative, whether you like it or not.

What are you not getting about the fact that Ron Paul completely and totally disqualifies himself as a serious Republican candidate with his foreign policy, defense policy and social policy positions? He can achieve those ratings because of what he is actually voting on. The Republican party in the House would never even allow votes on the kind of crazy stuff Ron Paul advocates. Paul is absolutely irresponsible in not firmly putting distance between himself and some of his conspiracy driven supporters. And what on earth is Paul doing appearing on the Alex Jones show?

Ron Paul does not even condemn the truthers who gravitate to his campaign. He just doesn't, and there is no way to paper over that. In fact, Paul is on record saying the only reason he doesn't get involved with finding "the truth of 9-11" is because he is too busy with other things.

Independents whose votes we must get to elect a President, than some limp-wristed endorsement about which NO ONE CARES.

Actually, the party that Ron Paul belongs to, the Republican Party, cared a lot. A real effort was made to persuade Paul to endorse the GOP nominee hoping to leverage some of his "youth" vote. Not only did Paul not endorse McCain, he called on voters to vote 3rd party. That may be a more popular position now, after the fact, but during the election it infuriated a lot of Republicans who wondered what the heck he was doing in the GOP in the first place.

The hill you've decided to defend with respect to O'Donell puts you in a very bad place.

There is no hill to defend here. Just pointing out that there were other reasons why many Republicans bailed on her in Delaware. Not only was she too flaky and carrying too much personal baggage to win statewide office in Delaware, but she'd already bailed on the party to run a 3rd party bid in 2006. She was considered a pariah from that point forward. She had zero chance to win no matter what the establishment said - and lost by 17 points (in a heavily Republican year) as an exclamation point about how true that was.

He's a better Republican than a lot of Establishment types who get a pass from you because they endorsed McCain.

My point in regards to this was that he is not bringing anything much to the Republican party. If his message was building the ranks of the GOP, he'd get a lot more sympathy from folks. Instead, Paul simply uses the Republican label for his own ends, doesn't provide any support to the eventual nominee himself, and directs his supporters to vote 3rd party. How on earth can you even begin to think this is good for the GOP? And if you don't give a darn about the party and think it's just dandy that Paul doesn't seem to either, what in the heck is doing in the GOP in the first place when he is obviously a Libertarian. Had he dropped out of the Republican party and ran as a Libertarian this time around you know perfectly well that he'd have won their nomination easily. He won't run honestly in the party he belongs to because he knows no one will pay attention to him - kinda like last time he ran as a libertarian when he garnered a whopping .5% of the vote in 1988.

I'm not a Paulbot; I would vote for him only as a last resort

If he won the nomination (and we both know he won't), I would vote for Paul VERY reluctantly. If my choice is Paul and Obama, I'd really have no choice but to vote for Paul. 3rd party voting is a cop-out and a wasted vote, so yes, if he won the nomination I'd hold my nose and vote for Paul. I think his foreign policy is downright dangerous. Extremely dangerous actually, but I'd have to hope reality would smack him in the face and he'd have trouble implementing it. I consider his social policy pretty unacceptable, but again, I don't think he'd have much success implementing most of it. I like quite a bit of his economic message and particularly the focus on massively less spending, so if battles post-election centered on economic policy perhaps he could do some good things. Still, I'd be extremely worried about how he'd react to a foreign policy crisis and I'd be highly concerned our competitors and enemies in the world would test his isolationism quickly - and suddenly find weakness and a void of leadership they'd exploit quickly.

Oh and thanks for the debate, it's been fun!