Punching Rick Perry

Republican hopefuls for president lofted more than two dozen factually checkable claims about the front-runner, Texas Gov. Rick Perry, in the latest presidential debates.

PolitiFact teams in Washington, Florida and Austin subsequently rated several punches and counterpunches.

These latest checks are stacked up next to this story.

To summarize, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney accurately recapped the fact that Perry described Social Security as a failure in his 2010 book, Fed Up! Romney’s other claim that Perry also called the program unconstitutional shook out as Mostly True.

U.S. Rep. Ron Paul of Texas jabbed at Perry about jobs created in Texas in his tenure, saying that 170,000 of them were government posts. That’s Half True.

Paul also said the U.S. military “is in 130 countries. We have 900 bases around the world.” That’s Mostly True.

For his part, Perry drew a Half True for his claim that Massachusetts Gov. Michael Dukakis created jobs three times faster on his watch than a successor, Romney. He got the same rating for his claim that when you look at “what we have done over the last decade, we created 1 million jobs in the state of Texas. At the same time, (the rest of) America lost 2.5 million.”

Smoke blew after Perry declared that the 2009 federal stimulus package created no jobs. Try more than 1 million. Pants on Fire!

Did we miss a debate roundhouse that merits checking? Write us at politifact@statesman.com . We’re also on Facebook and Twitter.