Mitt Romney and Rick Perry have something in common as campaigners: they are both much better on offense than defense. Perry, as both New Guy and Frontrunner, is naturally getting targeted these days, not just by Mitt but also by the various candidates striving for relevance. I thought Perry was so-so handling that in last night's debate; not good, but not bad enough to send people fleeing for the exits.

As I always say, to judge a candidate's performance you need to consider what they were trying to accomplish. Tonight was the start of what will surely be a series of engagements in which Mitt Romney and Rick Perry battle for the Republican Presidential nomination. As I see it: Republican voters probably like Perry better, but may think that Romney is the better bet against Obama.

As we turn the corner from Labor Day to the two-month home stretch of the Boston City Council campaign, John "JC Penny" Connolly remains way ahead of the at-large pack when it comes to banking coin. But he did not top the field for August -- young Felix Arroyo beat him, with help from a roughly $11,000 fundraiser in Puerto Rico.

It appears that Boston suffered its 11th homicide of August yesterday. This follows a 10-homicide July, making this only the second time Boston has had back-to-back double-digit murder counts since the 'Boston miracle' of the mid-1990s. It also happened in June-July 2006; that year, the city tallied 74 homicides for the year, after 75 in 2005, and everyone agreed the city was in a crisis.

You may have heard that President Obama wanted to give his jobs speech to Congress on Wednesday at 8:00pm, but has now agreed to Thursday, a little earlier in the evening to squeeze it in before NFL season kickoff. There was a lot of hoopla over the fact that the original time slot would have put the President directly up against the next Republican Presidential debate.

In this week's issue of the Boston Phoenix -- in print tomorrow, online now -- I report on a controversy that has Massachusetts environmental groups turning angrily against the Deval Patrick administration: woody biomass.

Final biomass-subsidy regulations are due soon, and the environmentalists -- even the usually less-strident ones -- are infuriated at what they believe is a capitulation to industry and its lobbyists.

Brighton's Steven Tolman has wrapped up the battle to be the next president of the Massachusetts AFL-CIO, as the Globe and others reported yesterday. Tolman's rival to succeed Robert Haynes, Tim Sullivan, bowed out of the race once it was clear that Tolman had the votes locked up for the October convention vote.

I spoke to Tolman, Sullivan, and others recently, for an item that had not yet run and is now obsolete.

I am writing to explain why I find NYU journalism prof Jay Rosen's big speech on the state of political journalism to be, as I called it on Twitter, "idiotic crap." I'll try to be brief.

--Rosen states as his overall theme a disgust with political journalists becoming "insiders." Of course they do; all journalists try to get further inside than their audience can, whether they're covering Mitt Romney or the town fire department.

Boston may be the epicenter of Massachusetts politics, but the effects of suburbanization are undeniable. At the moment, neither the senate president nor the speaker of the house lives in the city. And in two years, the unthinkable could become reality: Boston might not have a single congressman resident in its borders.

Eric Fehrnstrom has now emailed a confession to the Globe, admitting to being the man behind the @CrazyKhazei Twitter account. Fehrnstrom does not apologize in that statement, nor does he answer whether Scott Brown was aware of it, or whether he has other fun and fanciful Twitter accounts still barking insults about opposing candidates in the Massachusetts Senate race and/or any other race he's involved with, including his main meal ticket Mitt Romney.

Let's take a moment to appreciate how wise I was when I wrote back in April:

Romney's best hope of winning the nomination may actually be... to patiently stay the course as he falls from the front-runner's perch, working and waiting for the voters to come back to him....

To voters, front-runners are the steady girlfriend they leave to play the field.

For those not up to speed... Over on Twitter, there's been a joke account for a while called "CrazyKhazei" that makes snide comments clearly intended to poke fun at Alan Khazei and other Democratic candidates for US Senate. Local tweeter Chris Matthews caught something from the account of Eric Fehrnstrom -- longtime Mitt Romney aide and member of Scott Brown's campaign inner circle -- that he suspects reveals that Fehrnstrom is the CrazyKhazei tweeter.