A moment on the lips, a lifetime on the hips*:

As a billionaire in one of the dining capitals of the world, he can eat anything he wants. But he is obsessed with his weight — so much so that the sight of an unflattering photo of himself can trigger weeks of intense dieting and crankiness, according to friends and aides.

His food issues have become New York City’s. Although he has described his battle against unhealthy foods as common-sense public policy that will shed pounds (and save lives), many of his targets overlap with his own cravings.

“I like a Big Mac like everybody else,” he confessed the other day, explaining the city’s warts-and-all approach to fast food. “I just want to know how many calories are in it.”

Under his watch, the city has declared sodium an enemy, asking restaurants and food manufacturers to voluntarily cut the salt in their dishes by 20 percent or more, and encouraging diners to “shake the habit” by asking waiters for food without added salt.

But Mr. Bloomberg, 67, likes his popcorn so salty that it burns others’ lips. (At Gracie Mansion, the cooks deliver it to him with a salt shaker.) He sprinkles so much salt on his morning bagel “that it’s like a pretzel,” said the manager at Viand, a Greek diner near Mr. Bloomberg’s Upper East Side town house.

Not even pizza is spared a coat of sodium. When the mayor sat down to eat a slice at Denino’s Pizzeria Tavern on Staten Island recently, this reporter spotted him applying six dashes of salt to it.

And then there’s the concept of Asshole-In-Chief:

When he does not like the food, he rarely holds back. After dining at Blue Smoke, Mr. Meyer’s barbecue restaurant on East 27th Street, the mayor told Mr. Meyer, “I just don’t like it.”

Mr. Meyer tried inviting him back, but the mayor would not budge. “It never feels good when somebody tells you they don’t like your restaurant, but it’s nice when a politician does not pander,” he said, adding that the mayor has heaped praise on Union Square Cafe.

*In fact, Thompson should consider making this a slogan of sorts, e.g., you think it’s OK to suspend term limits just this once, but consider the deleterious long-term effects . . .

. . . who overstates his own sweatshop life story:

Queens City Councilman John Liu adamantly insisted Sunday that he worked in a sweatshop as a child, despite denials from both of his parents and two of his mother’s longtime friends.

Buried in the reaction to Cintra Wilson’s gratuitously obnoxious Critical Shopper piece about J.C. Penney in today’s Public Editor column is this admission exposing the Thursday Styles section for the sleazy high-end advertising vehicle that it is:

Wilson told me she usually writes about “obscure stores that don’t exist outside of Manhattan,” and she thinks of her audience as “1,300 women in Connecticut and urban gay guys in Manhattan.” She said it was “kind of provincial of me” not to realize how big The Times was and how her audience would expand when she reviewed a store like Penney’s. She said she also thought she hit a raw nerve with people already disposed to think of The Times as disconnected and unsympathetic. “It was dumb on my part not to see this coming,” she said.

But give bonus points to Wilson for ripping on Connecticut ladies in the process . . .

Inasmuch as birds can “learn,” the City plans to teach them:

“The serious dangers that Canada geese pose to aviation became all too clear when geese struck US Airways Flight 1549,” Mayor Bloomberg said Thursday in announcing the aggressive plan.

“The incident served as a catalyst to strengthen our efforts in removing geese from — and discouraging them from nesting on — city property near our runways.”

Federal wildlife officials will be dispatched to net and euthanize the molting birds over the next few weeks at 40 city parks and other locations near LaGuardia and Kennedy airports.

In addition, the Port Authority will train and arm supervisors to shoot the birds in an emergency situation.

Over the past six years, more than 1,200 geese have been netted and gassed on nearby Rikers Island in an effort to reduce the population and potentially dangerous collisions with planes.

But after a bird strike forced Flight 1549 to land in the Hudson River, there were calls for tougher measures.

Deputy Mayor Ed Skyler said the city will contract with the U.S. Agriculture Department to round up the geese and share the cost with the Port Authority.

“They have experience at Rikers,” Skyler said. “They know how to do it as humanely as possible.”

Geese will be targeted at Flushing Meadows Corona Park and Fort Totten.

I expect to see the numbers killed the next Mayor’s Management Report . . .

You can decide if that counts as a “sweeping vision” or just a series of small-bore Clinton-esque tweaks. As for the lawn furniture, the big so-called traffic-reducing Broadway pedestrian mall initiative apparently has met at least one of its goals:

While tourists and others enjoyed moseying around the traffic-free oasis on its first business day as a pedestrian mall, anyone making a delivery around Times Square fumed.

Drivers said streets surrounding the blocked-off areas were clogged with traffic — and pulling in front of a business to unload heavy boxes became a thing of the past.

“This is making my job more challenging,” said Steven McFadden, 48, a deliveryman for Citi Storage. “Longer walks to loading entrances, more competition for parking, more time for fewer deliveries and more parking tickets.”

John Gannon, 55, a mail carrier, predicted a long summer with traffic blocked off.

“For anybody who has to make a curbside delivery, it will be a problem. You’d have to park and walk a block or two,” he said. “If [Mayor] Bloomberg wants it to last, though, it’ll last.”

And you can amend the post title to include “Naked Cowboys” in the mayor’s sweeping vision:

Times Square and Herald Square vendors are cashing in on the car-free Broadway.

Everyone from food and souvenir hawkers to street performers said they were rolling in the dough yesterday thanks to the flood of pedestrians on the Great White Way.

“It is the coolest thing in the world. My business has quadrupled. It is like New Year’s Eve every day,” crowed the “Naked Cowboy,” Robert Burck.

To paraphrase Denzel Washington in Training Day, First you plant them, then you prune them:

The doomsday budget Mayor Bloomberg unveiled Friday calls for pruning trees less frequently — one of many belt-tightening measures planned for the 2010 fiscal year.

While the trimmed-down trimmings will save $1 million, the city has also scheduled a massive greening of streets and parks. According to its capital plan, more than $250 million is earmarked to plant new trees over the next 10 years.

I didn’t realize the Giuliani administration was a beacon of racial diversity:

Bloomberg administration officials point out, however, that the percentage of minority commissioners and agency heads is roughly the same as it was under Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani.

The mayor’s aggressive approach to gun control reaps results:

In 2008, even as gun killings fell, the number of killings committed with knives or other “cutting instruments” rose 50 percent in New York City, the Police Department said: to 125 from 83. Some other large cities saw no such increase last year, and police officials and experts are at a loss to explain what is either a new trend or a spike.

“It is hard to say with certainty what accounts for the increase,” said Paul J. Browne, the chief spokesman for the New York Police Department.

It was possible, but hard to document, Mr. Browne said, that measures like undercover gun-trafficking investigations and interrogations, in which people arrested for lower level crimes are asked to provide information on gun cases, had led to the rise in knife killings and the drop in gun slayings.

In 2008, 292 people were shot to death in New York, down from 347 the year before, continuing a longtime slide in deaths by firearms.

Over all, homicides of all kinds rose slightly last year, to 523 from 496 in 2007, which was a 45-year low. So far in 2009, about a quarter of killings in the city have been committed with knives or other cutting instruments, about the same percentage as in 2008. But the overall homicide rate is down: 97 through April 16, the Police Department said, compared with 135 in the same period in 2008.

“We may have made it harder for killers to get their hands on guns,” said Mr. Browne. “Knives are still easily and legally acquired.”

Is that really the coordinated message?

They grift! Or as Kari Ferrell might explain it had you run into her, “I want you to throw a hot dog down my hall”:

It’s likely that when Kari Ferrell walked into the Vice magazine offices in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, last month to interview for an administrative assistant job, they thought they’d hit the jackpot. Ms. Ferrell — petite, 22 years old, of Korean heritage — had a huge tattoo of a dragon across her chest and a cute pixie haircut. She was talkative, funny, charming, adorable. She had a tattoo on her back that read “I Love Beards.” She told them she’d been working for the New York office of the concert promotion company GoldenVoice, which puts on huge rock festivals like Coachella near Palm Springs, Calif., and that she’d moved to New York from Utah just a few months earlier. They hired her on the spot.

A few days later, one of Ms. Ferrell’s new colleagues came by her desk. “I said, ‘Excuse me, miss, is [her boss] downstairs?’” the 29-year-old told The Observer. “She thought that was very polite that I said, ‘Excuse me, miss,’ and after that she started talking to me, instant-messaging me. She asked if I was from the South. I told her no. It escalated from there.”

Within the space of a half-hour, Ms. Ferrell was peppering him with questions about his sexual history — how many women he’d slept with and so on. “She was coming on to me, and I was super into it for the first part of it,” he said. “I realized I could have fun after work — but then I was like, ‘Let me check this girl out.’” He Googled her. Up popped a photo of his flirtatious new co-worker on the Salt Lake City Police Department’s Most Wanted list, wanted on five different warrants, including passing $60,000 in bad checks, forgery and retail theft.

So if higher-than-normal asthma rates in the Bronx are the result of cockroaches and not car pollution (as the mayor repeated over and over with scientific certainty*), I suppose that means that congestion pricing and trees are really unnecessary then:

Asthma is the most common chronic disease of childhood, one that strikes the poor disproportionately. Up to one-third of children living in inner-city public housing have allergic asthma, in which a specific allergen sets off a cascade of events that cause characteristic inflammation, airway constriction and wheezing.

Now, using an experimental model that required leaving the pristine conditions of the lab for the messier ones of life, a team of scientists from the Boston University School of Medicine have discovered what that allergen is.

“For inner-city children,” said the lead researcher, Dr. Daniel G. Remick, a professor of pathology, “the major cause of asthma is not dust mites, not dog dander, not outdoor air pollen. It’s allergies to cockroaches.”

*He’s been doing that a lot lately.

. . . no one realizes something is a landmark:

The team behind the Cherry Hill Gourmet Restaurant and Market to open in Lundy’s has finally revealed why it ripped up part of the historic building’s exterior — it didn’t know the building was landmarked.

Apparently, the architect hired for the project never checked city records.

“Our architect did not do that,” project manager Anthony Kelley told residents at last week’s Sheepshead Bay/Plumb Beach Civic Association meeting, which was held in the famed Emmons Avenue building.

As a result, workers replaced the concrete in front of the building with small, colored tiles and installed a black iron railing near Lundy’s main entrance.

“The awnings were taken down and the outside was started — yes, our fault,” Kelley admitted.

Just a cautionary tale for the future . . .

We wanted you to exist, which is of course why you exist:

It’s not that there’s no truth in it. Megan and I exist. That’s like saying David Sedaris’s life never happened

Read: Who am I kidding? I just wrote down $3 billion in debt* on my newspaper operations . . . we need all the advertisers we can get:

As the Chairman of the New York Post, I am ultimately responsible for what is printed in its pages. The buck stops with me.

Last week, we made a mistake. We ran a cartoon that offended many people. Today I want to personally apologize to any reader who felt offended, and even insulted.

Over the past couple of days, I have spoken to a number of people and I now better understand the hurt this cartoon has caused. At the same time, I have had conversations with Post editors about the situation and I can assure you — without a doubt — that the only intent of that cartoon was to mock a badly written piece of legislation. It was not meant to be racist, but unfortunately, it was interpreted by many as such.

*

Maybe you were wondering how the City will pay for the $2.1 billion 7 train extension to an undeveloped part of Manhattan. So are they:

Now that there are a handful of giant holes under Chelsea for the line, and soon to be two drills that are making tunnels, the likelihood that the project will actually come to fruition is increasing substantially (though no one has agreed to pay for cost overruns yet). But with the economy in shambles, the question becomes how quickly — or slowly — development will sprout up on the far West Side.

This is more than just an academic question. To fund the $2.1 billion budgeted for the extension, the city sold bonds that are to be repaid with the extra taxes expected from all the new development on the West Side. If development takes years to begin — or never happens — the city would need to use money out of its budget to pay the $100 million or so annually in debt service, adding to an already high debt burden.

At the announcement today, the mayor delivered what sounded like a slight plea to developers to get building again.

“If anybody’s a developer out there, and if you want to know a good time to start, I can’t think of a better time,” he said. “People are ready to take the jobs, you can buy concrete and steel a lot cheaper than you could have before, and you’ll have these buildings ready when our economy comes roaring back and people are going to need space.”

Questions including but not limited to “What exactly are you injecting in my ass?” for example:

Major League Baseball banned steroids in 1991, though it didn’t start testing players until 2003. It had long been illegal to use them without a doctor’s prescription.

Rodriguez was vague on how he obtained the drugs, but admitted he took them without asking many, if any, questions.

“Again, it was such a loosey-goosey era,” he said. “I’m guilty for a lot of things. I’m guilty for being negligent, naive, not asking all the right questions. To be quite honest, I don’t know exactly what substance I was guilty of using.”

Don’t worry, Kevin, the additions to the Mets’ pitching staff might mean they have a chance against Philadelphia this year:

The city will relinquish use of the 12-seat box in exchange for whatever revenue the Yankees generate by selling the seats, minus the cost of marketing them. Although neither the city nor the Yankees have publicly disclosed the market value of the suite, similar suites at the new stadium are being sold for as much as $600,000 a year.

The city’s acquisition of the Yankees suite had drawn scrutiny, especially after e-mail messages surfaced in November showing that aides to Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg had zealously pursued the luxury box, as well as free food and access to post-season games.

. . .

The e-mail messages revealed that after the Yankees made concessions over the size of the suite and the food, the team received an additional 250 parking spaces, as well as the rights to three new billboards along the Major Deegan Expressway and whatever revenue they generate.

The messages contrasted with earlier public statements from Seth W. Pinsky, president of the city’s Economic Development Corporation, that the suite was not a big issue and that the city had received it simply as a matter of course. One message said that the acquisition of a suite in the Mets stadium was “a big issue to the mayor.”

Under the new arrangement with the city, the Yankees will be allowed to keep the parking spaces and use of the billboards, and the city will be guaranteed at least $100,000 for each baseball season, even if no one buys the suite. The deal was formalized last month in a letter from Mr. Pinsky to the Yankees president, Randy Levine, that was made public on Tuesday. A similar arrangement is being negotiated with the Mets, which also gave the city free use of a suite in its new ballpark, Citi Field.

Location Scout: New Yankee Stadium.

Letter to the Editor of the Day goes to Public Theater AD Oskar Eustis:

I am writing to clarify a comment I made in your Dec. 3 article about “Hair” moving to Broadway (”Broadway Gets ‘Hair’; ‘Hair’ Gets New Deal,” Arts pages). I was quoted as saying the Public Theater “risked nonprofit money in a commercial enterprise, something that is foolish and probably illegal.”

I wish I could say that I was misquoted, but I wasn’t. Hyperbole, excitement about the future of “Hair” and my own carelessness led me to say something that was inaccurate and wrong.

Nothing the Public Theater did in investing in commercial productions was illegal or done for any reason other than supporting the mission of the Public. I wish to apologize to all concerned.

The mayor’s finely honed Jo Moore sensibilities on display during this historic occasion:

Mayor Bloomberg plans to send out 500 pink slips as part of his goal to slash 3,000 jobs from the city’s workforce to cope with the budget crisis.

The layoffs will come from various agencies, said a source, who would not identify which will be hit.

To meet the target, City Hall is canceling the January Police Academy class, eliminating 475 education positions and chopping night hours at five fire engine companies, his administration revealed Tuesday.

Bloomberg, who recently said layoffs were unlikely, will announce the job cuts today as part of his midyear budget changes.

The drastic move is meant to partially plug a budget gap for this year and next that stands at $4 billion, his administration said.

In September, Bloomberg predicted his budget blow could be achieved without firing city workers, but he never committed to saving jobs.

“I don’t think we will get to the point of layoffs,” he had said.

The looming pink slips have some lawmakers stunned.

“I thought layoffs were a last resort. I thought we’d do attrition first and see how it is,” said Councilman David Weprin (D-Queens) who heads the Finance Committee.

Annotation: There was obviously a deal, wasn’t there?

More democracy, not less:

Setting up a showdown over one of the most divisive issues in recent political memory, Speaker Christine C. Quinn announced Tuesday that the City Council would vote Thursday on Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s plan to revise the term limits law so he can pursue four more years in office.

Supporters of the change said the move reflected Mr. Bloomberg’s and Ms. Quinn’s confidence that they have gathered the 26 Council votes needed to pass the legislation.

There are also signs that public opinion is tilting against the change, and privately some allies of Ms. Quinn say she is anxious, if not desperate, to hold the vote before an advertising campaign opposing the change takes hold.

“If it’s not on Thursday, they’re in trouble,” said one council member who supports the bill, speaking on condition of anonymity so as not to upset the mayor or the speaker.

Well that explains it then:

“The public was against changing term limits,” he said, “but at the same time, they had this enormous confidence in the way the city was going. And I just couldn’t understand why the two were not tied together.”

The Sunday of a holiday weekend is not a bad time to wedge in a guilty admission:

In a complete about-face, City Council Speaker Christine Quinn today embraced legislation to extend term limits for city officials and all but endorsed Mayor Bloomberg for a third term, citing the tumultuous economy.

“I have decided to change my position because I believe the opportunity, the potential of consistent leadership by this council and this mayor, would be in the best interests of the city,” Quinn said, citing the “global economic crisis.”

Until now, she adamantly opposed extending term limits through legislation.

And that brave stance pays off:

Mayor Bloomberg praised City Council Speaker Christine Quinn to the high heavens yesterday, and didn’t deny a Post report he could offer her a job — a day after she publicly threw her support behind the mayor’s plan to extend term limits.

“Chris Quinn, if she wasn’t in government, would have enormous opportunities in the private sector as well as the public sector,” Bloomberg said.

He was reacting to a Page Six report that said Bloomberg is prepared to hire Quinn as a deputy mayor if she loses the speaker’s post in 2010.

Mayoral spokesman Stu Loeser flatly denied the report. A spokesman for Quinn described it as both “untrue” and “malicious.”

Bloomberg didn’t address the question directly. Instead, he made a strong pitch to council members to keep Quinn in her powerful post.

“I just want, for the sake of the city, particularly during tough times, that we’ll have Chris Quinn leading the City Council,” the mayor said.

Emphasis on, “I don’t want to walk away”:

The term-limits question could have gone before the voters a third time next month had Bloomberg appointed a Charter Revision Commission he promised in January in his State of the City speech.

Councilman Bill DeBlasio (D-Brooklyn) called on the mayor to name that commission now so it could do just that in a special election.

But the mayor rejected that idea as “problematic.”

No need for referendum, by the way:

Council Speaker Christine Quinn disclosed Thursday that the mayor’s bill will request a permanent extension of term limits instead of a one-time waiver.

The question of whether to extend term limits permanently to three four-year terms from two — rather than just once for Bloomberg and other incumbents — is one of the most contentious aspects of the controversial move.

“As I understand the mayor’s bill, it is a bill that would permanently change term limits from eight years to 12 years,” said Quinn in a seeming slip.

Ronald Lauder, who bankrolled the 1993 and 1996 term limit referendum, tells us we should kill it, kill it:

My fellow New Yorkers agreed with this and voted overwhelmingly for term limits in both elections. And over 15 years, the concept has proved itself correct. Term limits gave us a more dynamic City Council. It also gave us Michael Bloomberg — a smart, competent and popular mayor. So having said all that, why do I suddenly have a change of heart on something about which I feel so strongly? Why do I believe term limits should be lifted temporarily to allow Mr. Bloomberg to run for a third term? The answer is simple.

I lived and worked here in New York during the fiscal crisis in the early 1970s. I remember how close this city came to going under. I also remember how that financial crisis trickled down and depressed life not just on Wall Street, but on every street in every borough. Housing prices plummeted, storefronts remained empty for years, business stagnated and opportunity dried up. A corresponding rise in crime led to nightmare murders that became the stuff of horror movies. Visitors stayed away, further eroding the city’s economy. Times Square in 1975 was not a place you wanted to bring your children.

I never want to see that happen again. During the last few weeks, we have seen an unprecedented rupture in our national economic system that rivals not 1975, but 1929. Ground zero for this financial meltdown is not Washington or California or small-town America, but New York. The sudden and shocking demise of major institutions like Lehman Brothers and Bear Stearns only reinforces the comparison to the earlier and even darker time.

Certainly, there are able candidates for mayor in both parties; I know and admire many of them. But I believe that for a city poised on the brink of economic disaster (and experience tells us that economic disasters eventually become social disasters), a prosperous future depends in large measure on a mayor with a deep understanding of finance, governance and politics.

There’s a strong vote of confidence about what the city’s economy will look like on January 1, 2010. I wonder what he knows . . . but as much as Lauder feels good about his own efforts to tame the sclerotic system of entrenched lawmakers, shouldn’t an idea be a good or bad idea regardless of who supports it financially?

So let’s tease this out — given that Bloomberg is especially suited to saving New York City from catastrophic economic woes 15 months from now, what exactly has the mayor done that is so impressive on this front? What will he do, create a computer terminal? What about his tenure in office — doing mayoral things that every mayor does, and acccomplishing mayoral goals that every mayor has — what about his work in office would bring someone to this conclusion? For starters, consult his astounding 96 percent success rate in fulfilling his 2005 campaign promises (as of 2007) (.pdf here). Obviously no one else in the whole world would have been able, for example, to “expand the Out-of-School Time (OST) system to increase the number of young people served” (page 4). That’s great and all — but that doesn’t exactly show how he would single-handedly stave off a worldwide recession.

I say look on the bright side, if Bloomberg is unable to lead and the city starts to look like Scorsese’s Taxi Driver, then we won’t have to worry about where to put those million new residents, will we?

No, not this mayor. “The Mayor’s Dangerous Idea” was the title of a Times editorial in 2001 that argued against Giuliani’s idea to extend his term three months to deal with the aftermath of Sept. 11:

Mayor Rudolph Giuliani wants to extend his current term of office into 2002, postponing the inauguration of a new mayor for several months. This is a terrible idea. Neither New York City nor the nation has ever postponed the transfer of power because the public was convinced it could not get along without the current incumbent. The very concept goes against the most basic of American convictions, that we live in a nation governed by rule of law.

To suggest that the city would be incapable of getting along without Mr. Giuliani after the end of the year undermines New York’s sense of self-sufficiency and normality, which the mayor himself has worked so hard to restore. While Mr. Giuliani has been a great leader during this crisis, the truth is that no one is indispensable. George Washington understood that when he rejected repeated attempts to keep him in office indefinitely. Washington was followed in the presidency by a long line of successors, some of them distinctly mediocre. But the country went on, because people put their faith in the democratic process and not in the strength of any one individual.

Mr. Giuliani has asked his three possible successors to agree to postpone the next inauguration and let him stay on for a few more months to continue his work on the city’s recovery. He and his supporters are holding out the threat that if the mayor is not given his wish, they will mount an attempt to repeal the term limits law so he can run for re-election in November. They argue that he needs just a few extra months to finish the most critical work in the wake of an enormous disaster. But one critical task after another is going to crop up for the foreseeable future. And history suggests that the worst time to change the election rules is right before an election, in a time of crisis.

. . .

Mr. Giuliani already has the ability to make sure the transfer of power is smooth. The mayor should begin working immediately to bring his potential successors up to speed. When he leaves office Jan. 1, he should urge key members of his own administration to stay on to finish the work they are doing if his successor wishes them to stay. The best way for Mr. Giuliani to help New York City after Jan. 1 is not by retaining power but by giving it up in the most generous way possible.

All of which is interesting given the Times’ editorial this morning endorsing Bloomberg’s proposal to temporarily overturn term limits to allow himself and all members of the City Council a chance to run for a third term:

The bedrock of American democracy is the voters’ right to choose. Though well intentioned, New York City’s term limits law severely limits that right, which is why this page has opposed term limits from the outset. The law is particularly unappealing now because it is structured in a way that would deny New Yorkers — at a time when the city’s economy is under great stress — the right to decide for themselves whether an effective and popular mayor should stay in office.

Partly for this reason, and partly to extend their own political careers, a majority of City Council members are thinking about amending the city law to allow elected officials to serve three consecutive terms instead of two. That would permit Mayor Michael Bloomberg to run again in 2009 and could also prolong the service of council members and other senior elected officials. Mr. Bloomberg, who is expected to announce on Thursday that he will seek a third term if he can, likes the idea a lot.

We do, too. But we would go further and ask the Council to abolish term limits altogether — not to serve any individual’s political career but to serve the larger cause of democracy.

Which really is to say, we’re not serious about this at all. Think back to the large outpouring of support for Giuliani after Sept. 11 — “mayor for life” and all that. Does the Times editorial board really — no, seriously, really — think Bloomberg has more good will right now than Giuliani did after Sept. 11?

It makes a lot of people uncomfortable to legislatively rewrite a law that voters have twice approved at the ballot box — in 1993 and 1996. It makes us uncomfortable, too, and we previously took the position that any change should be left to the voters. But we have concluded now that changing the law legislatively does not make us nearly as uncomfortable as keeping it. It is within the rights of the Council, itself an elected body, to do so.

Term limits are seductive, promising relief from mediocre, self-perpetuating incumbents and gridlocked legislatures. They are also profoundly undemocratic, arbitrarily denying voters the ability to choose between good politicians and bad, especially in a city like New York with a strong public campaign-financing system, while automatically removing public servants of proven ability who are at a productive point in their careers.

But again — who exactly — exactly who — is agitating for a change? Is this something families discuss over dinner, expressing fear that their elected representative who is right in the middle of a productive point in his career won’t have had enough time to fulfill his legacy? Or is this coming from the people who would truly be affected by term limits, which is to say, the mayor and the City Council?

The City Council members who want to change the law are not alone. A survey in The Times last month found that at least two dozen local governments are suffering buyer’s remorse about the term limits they adopted, mostly in the 1990s. One common complaint is that they force politicians to focus on small-bore projects that can be achieved quickly rather than visionary ideas. The constant churning also diminishes accountability in governmental institutions like the City Council.

See, elected officials in governments everywhere are unhappy that they only have a limited time in office! As much as I’m excited to let council members explore visionary ideas, I have a feeling New York City will somehow survive.

Then there’s the up-is-down argument that this is actually more democratic:

Most places that are trying to relax term limits are likely to do so via the ballot box, with several referendums due in November. There is a chance that a vote on the issue could be organized early next year in New York in conjunction with special elections to the City Council. But such elections do not attract many voters. In the end, a vote by the Council is probably the most democratic way to address the matter.

And if you don’t like it, vote the bums out:

It is worth repeating: This is a rule that needs to be abolished. If the voters don’t like the result, they can register their views at the polls.

Good idea. It almost makes you want to hope that Bloomberg, despite the millions he will spend, will go down horribly next November.

Ultimately, you have to wonder who is so excited about a third Bloomberg term? The Times’ report clarifies:

With his decision, Mr. Bloomberg is overruling the advice of his top three assistants at City Hall — Deputy Mayors Edward Skyler, Patricia E. Harris and Kevin Sheekey –who have expressed opposition to a third term.

Those aides have told the mayor — at times forcefully — that any campaign to challenge the term-limits law would look like an end run around voters, and could sully his legacy as a reform-minded outsider. Others have told the mayor that they may not remain for a full third term.

In the business community, however, the idea of a Bloomberg third term is popular. At charity balls and on golf courses, executives like the financier Steven Rattner, the developer Jerry I. Speyer and the media mogul Rupert Murdoch have encouraged him to seek a third term.

Got that? Wall Street, a developer and Rupert Murdoch. Given what has happened this past month, do you really want to trust those guys?

On the one hand, sure, just 11 out of 190 of those arrested in Belmar this summer were from Staten Island. On the other hand, fully 11 out of 190 of those arrested in Belmar this summer were from Staten Island:

It turns out most of Belmar, N.J.’s unruly troublemakers don’t come from Staten Island after all.

After Belmar Mayor Ken Pringle famously sparked a furor this July by writing a screed about “SI girls behaving badly” and “guidos,” his own police department’s crime statistics ended up telling a very different story about Islanders’ behavior in the Jersey Shore town.

Just 11 of the 190 people arrested in Belmar between May 29 and Sept. 1 hailed from Staten Island, according to a published report.

One of those arrests — an incident where a Staten Island woman allegedly attacked another patron at a bar popular with the borough’s visitors — spurred Pringle to write about “Staten Island girls” in the “Belmar Summer Rental News.”

“As the Staten Island girl was pummeling the Boonton girl’s face, she used the hand she was still holding her drink glass in,” Pringle wrote in the newsletter. “Now, we’re not sure if the glass was stuck to her hand cause of all the hair spray or if this is a technique Staten Island girls learn in Brownies, but we are thankful she left her brass knuckles and straight razor in her other purse.”

The remarks sparked a firestorm of public opinion — Pringle soon apologized, then toured the borough’s cultural landmarks in an attempt to mend fences.

Pringle didn’t return a phone call yesterday seeking comment about the police stats.

Earlier.

How about millions in the nation’s largest media market! Another NYC Teaching Fellow success story:

A Harlem teaching fellow who vanished nearly two weeks ago may have gone into hiding because she was afraid to return to the troubled school where she was assigned, sources told The Post.

“Apparently, she was petrified of going back to school. She just wigged out and went AWOL,” a law-enforcement source said of Hannah Upp, who failed to return for her second year at the Thurgood Marshall Academy.

The worst had been feared for Upp, 23, until she was caught on surveillance video using a computer at the Fifth Avenue Apple store on Friday. Witnesses told cops she returned to the store on Monday.

Upp, 23, a Bryn Mawr College graduate, hadn’t been seen since Aug. 29. Her wallet and ID were left in her Hamilton Terrace apartment.

Technology is so, so cool:

A mugging victim spotted pictures on the Internet of people wearing the jewelry snatched from him after a night of clubbing, authorities said yesterday.

A short time after the May 6 heist, Charles Zamian, 24, found a Web site with pictures of people posing in his stolen jewelry, police said.

He forwarded the images to the cops, who sent investigators to the club where the victim had been partying the night he was mugged.

On Tuesday, they spotted one of the men in the pictures, Shamel Corbett, 23, of Brooklyn, hanging out in the club.

After Corbett left, they followed and arrested him, along with pals Fernando Francis and Jerome Davis, both 23 and from Brooklyn.

As in, only the Mets could make people angry for firing a manager who not only led the team to the worst collapse in Major League history but followed that up with trailing the Phillies in the standings by six-and-a-half games in only June. That’s basically the definition of “bumbler”:

Cowardly. Embarrassing. Disrespectful.

These are just some of the words used Tuesday by Mets fans and analysts to describe general manager Omar Minaya’s bizarre firing — at 3:14 a.m. New York time — of manager Willie Randolph and two coaches at a Los Angeles hotel.

“We could not go on as a team as it was this weekend, it was not fair to the players,” Minaya said at a hastily arranged news conference Tuesday in Los Angeles, where Minaya had fired the trio after the Mets beat the Angels.

“I had to tell him as soon as I felt the decision was made,” Minaya said of the timing.

While many agreed the Mets needed a new manager, the manner in which Minaya fired Randolph and replaced him on an interim basis with bench coach Jerry Manuel has been universally panned.

“The team handled it terribly,” said Joe Pietaro, editor in chief of New York Sports Scene Magazine. “The way they did it was to have the least amount of New York media on top of it as it happened. To bring him out to L.A., to do it after the game at the time was inappropriate.”

Besides Randolph, Minaya also fired pitching coach Rick Peterson and base coach Tom Niento. All were announced in a news release that went out in the middle of the night.

“I don’t know what they were thinking,” Joe Hamrahi, managing editor of baseballdigestdaily.com., said of the firing’s timing. “These guys are not amateurs; they have a full media-relations team that should have advised them that this would have made them look bad. I think it was a terrible mistake and Minaya is going to live to regret it.”

. . .

“I thought it was dirty,” said Jeff Mitchell, 40, of the Bronx. “They did it in the middle of the night and on the West Coast. Why let him fly out there? It makes it looks like there’s bad blood. They should’ve shown more class.”

“Terrible,” sad Robert Wilson, 46, of Murray Hill. “They could’ve handled it more professionally and more gracefully.”

Despite their historic collapse last season, the Mets were favored to win the NL pennant this year. However, the team’s $138 million payroll along with the addition of pitcher Johan Santana hasn’t helped the team rise above mediocrity. Going into last night, the Mets were 34-35, six-and-half games behind the rival Phillies.

See also: “Damn Mets!” (Observer, June 17, 2008) — the URL for which features the snappier “No Balls,” which might be a better headline.

Main symptoms — blurred eyesight and/or hallucinations:

Vinny Vella was a millionaire — for a day, at least.

That’s $5 million, to be exact. But just like that, the lottery took it all away.

Vella thought he had two lucky sevens. But the lottery said one of the sevens was a 17.

Now the 61-year-old actor is depressed — and angry.

“I’m going to put the lawyers on it,” he says, his hoarse voice rising above its normal whisper. “Without a doubt. Without a doubt.”

. . .

Last Thursday, Vella bought a $500 Million Extravaganza lottery ticket on Mulberry Street, scratched off the numbers and thought he had two sevens — which would have made him a $5 million winner.

He went around telling everyone he was a millionaire.

Then came the fall.

On Friday, he took the ticket to a state lottery office, which said one of the sevens actually was a 17 — and to boot, it had the abbreviation “sevtn” written under the numeral.

Vella, who has his own cable access show, raised a fuss and yesterday a lottery employee drove the ticket up to lottery headquarters in Schenectady, where experts enlarged a picture of the ticket and found a faint “1″ next to the 7.

They also checked the bar code and other security features on the ticket and determined it was not a winner.

That did not satisfy Vella at all, not at all.

“If it’s a misprint, it’s not my fault,” Vella fumed. “You know what I look like after telling everybody I won — I look like some big ass.”

Vella, who played Jimmy Petrille on “The Sopranos,” vowed to make this an issue on the TV show he hosts on Time Warner’s Channel 56. He also promised to carry protest signs in front of state lottery offices.

“I will do everything I can until these people are down on their knees,” he said.