At 1 p.m., Mayor Bloomberg will be giving his annual State of the City address in Staten Island. The NY Times says it'll offer him "an opportunity to reassert his agenda after a series of setbacks. He has endured a bruising battle over his new schools chancellor, an $80 million fraud scheme involving the city’s payroll system and a botched effort by the city to deal with a crippling snowstorm last month." So, third term jinx or not?

With his ratings at a new low (just months after being named the best mayor EVER), Bloomberg said he didn't regret his third term plotting (of course, after he was safely in office, he was all about resetting things to two terms), "I hope it was the right move for the city, and I think it was the right move for me," but a historian tells the Times, "People can reasonably speculate that a more engaged and focused mayor would have handled things differently. It’s an office that tends to wear its occupants out." We hear Bermuda is a place where mayors can recharge.

Stuart Applebaum, Retail, Wholesale, Department Store Union president, offered City Hall News more thoughts on a possible Bloomberg third term jinx, saying people are tired, "[Schools Chancellor Black, City Time, and the blizzard] just build on some sort of amorphous impression that people already had—there's something left over from term limits, there's something left over from the election.... They're not willing to just accept what he says. At first people were thinking this is a billionaire, and they thought that some money was going to fall out of his pockets. Then he was running for the second term, and he was going to run for president. Then he was running for a third term. What's next? He's not going to be president." Or maybe he will!

However, former Mayor Ed Koch, who served three terms, scoffed, "I don't believe that the third-term jinx exists. It's exactly as fictitious as the curse of the Pharaoh Tuten-whateverhisnamewas. You don't die just because you were in his tomb." And Bloomberg's Deputy Mayor Howard Wolfson said that Bloomberg isn't about stunts (see: Cory Booker shoveling driveways), "We don't need gimmicks. The basics, prior to Christmas, have worked well," and that New Yorkers will benefit from Bloomberg's reforms, like tackling escalating pension costs, "It's not something that people will be able to see when they walk outside the doors, but they'll be able to see that they have services as a result of the fact that we are not bankrupting ourselves with pensions that we can't afford."