I like this question so will just jump in:
Fred is still a cypher to me, one I want to learn more about, but nonetheless a cypher. He has some good rhetoric and some bad votes (and some good ones). He is like GWB 6+ years ago - a man with a slim record but who looks better than the rest.
I need to mine his votes further. Men who change once they get in Washington are not the kind I want to vote for. I will also look at Hunter more, and Ron Paul. Hunter needs to convince me he is not a spendocrat and that he can be discerning when it comes to military spending especially.
Ron Paul is a much-needed tonic to the Republican "where-else-you-gonna go?" hubris. As a party, the Republicans throw social conservatives a bone some of the time, fiscal conservatives hardly at all, and Constitutional conservatives/small-governement voters once in a blue moon. They are the Nixon country club set but they put a cross or Reagan bobblehead on the limo as the hood ornament when it's expedient.
And Ron Paul may even be right on foreign policy. I say might because I am still trying to get facts, not hearsay or alarmist rumblings, on the threat posed by Iran to the USA. If the USA truly wants to taper off Muslim terrorism (aimed at Americans and not, well, other Muslims), we need to learn to not need Arab oil. As long as we instrumentally play country against country and people against people in the name of geo-politics, they are going to sniff it out and resent it, and of course use it to stir the pot against us for centuries.
This does not address the larger "death by democracy" issue in which non-breeding Westerners fear the takeover of their culture by rapidly-breeding Muslims. Westerners have their fate in their own hands and will ultimately live or die according to how much they value the gift of life - ie children and procreation and the unborn - as parents and societies blessed with some of the most abundant riches and liberties on earth. As a society we can't say "we won't breed but we need to import a slave class" and then be shocked when that class starts to take over. It's sowing the wind and reaping the whirlwind. It's solution can come form one of two directions, it seems to me.
I too am still uncertain of Fred as a viable candidate. For now I will go with Hunter, even though he seems to not be getting any traction. The other threesome, Giuliani, Romney & McCain are not my idea of solid conservatives. For more on Thompson by Richard Viguerie go here: http://www.conservativesbetrayed.com/gw3/articles-latestnews/articles.php?CMSArticleID=1827&CMSCategoryID=19