It's official: Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) has qualified by his rising poll numbers to appear in this Thursday's Fox-sponsored Republican presidential candidate debate, the last before the first votes of election 2016 are cast in Iowa on Feb. 1.

While Paul is in, frontrunner Donald Trump is saying today that, because he feels Fox isn't treating him fairly, he will be out.

Paul hosted a telephone press conference this afternoon in which he talked about the debate and other things. Some highlights:

• Naturally, he still thinks he can do very well in Iowa. When the news he'd made the Fox debate was official, Paul says, in his Des Moines campaign office "100 young men and women making phone calls were jumping up and down and screaming, excited." He brags hisone for holding the line on both military and domestic spending.

He pokes at fellow candidates and senators Marco Rubio (Fla.) and Ted Cruz (Texas) for supporting $200 billion in military spending hikes with no offsets. Paul posits there could be as much as $100 billion in pure waste in current military spending, and "very few voices are talking about that." He believes that positioning himself as the only fiscal conservative on stage can work for him.

• Paul thinks fellow senator Ted Cruz is a crummy liberty candidate, and is confident that that wing of the Party still belongs to him. Cruz, Paul says, will ultimately face the "authenticity" dilemma with the liberty Republican wing. "They are big supporters of Audit the Fed" and Cruz failed to show up