Taxi Commissioner David Yassky and Assemblyman Micah Kellner mix it up, on Facebook.

Kellner chided the city's "Taxi of Tomorrow" for being "the delivery van of yesterday."

Yassky - a bookish, former law school professor with a dry sense of humor - wrote "And can we please schedule time to debate what a 'van' is." That was a sarcastic reference to what Kellner wrote on Facebook on Tuesday.

(Kellner, that day, wrote, "Mayor Bloomberg and David Yassky would prefer to debate the definition of 'van' is instead of making all cabs accessible. Was a third term really necessary for this disgrace?")

After Yassky's comments today, Kellner, who has taken up the mantle of disability access as a key legislative aim, responded, "I'll leave that to the lawyers at the Department of Justice."

“People around the world watched and were inspired as people in Iran risked their lives to vote,” she told The New York Times, referring to her current situation. “New Yorkers deserve the same. They deserve the right to vote, the right to make their own decision.”

But since entering Congress in 1992, Representative Maloney has worked hard to make sure she was the only choice for Democrats in her Congressional district, as her operatives and supporters moved on multiple occasions to block potential Democratic opponents from getting onto the ballot. (It's standard operating procedure to challenge petitions, but it's a tactic that seems pretty starkly at odds with the logic of Maloney's Iran analogy.)

In 1998, a candidate identified in City Board of Elections records as “D. Landis” filed petitions to run in a Democratic primary against Maloney. On August 4, 1998, that candidate was knocked off the ballot. The specific objector was Stuart Osnow, a political consultant at the firm Prime New York, which worked with Maloney’s campaign at the time.

In 2002, publisher and attorney Jeff Brauer tried to run. He plastered mailboxes with colorful posters and offered some voters free books in exchange for their signatures on his petitions. Critics raised questions about the propriety of those tactics. But when Brauer filed petitions to get on the ballot, a legal fight ensued. In the end, he was removed from the ballot by the State Supreme Court. Again, Osnow was an objector.

(Osnow’s business partner, Jerry Skurnik, recalled that the Manhattan Democratic commissioner at the time, Doug Kellner, had to recuse himself from the matter since he was Osnow’s attorney in an unrelated real estate matter. Without Kellner’s vote, Board of Elections commissioners were deadlocked over whether to remove Brauer, which is why it went to court, Skurnik said.)

Then in 2004, came Robert Jereski.

Critical of Maloney’s House votes to authorize the Iraq war and for the Patriot Act, Jereski sought the Democratic nomination in her district. He was removed from the ballot by City Board of Elections officials after objections were filed by six Maloney supporters, including Trudy Mason, a well-known activist in Manhattan Democratic politics, and Micah Kellner, then Maloney’s campaign manager and now an assemblyman on the East Side.

"I am glad that our efforts to have a primary and debate, which she rejected in 2004, has influenced her decision to embrace one now,” said Jereski in an interview with The Observer.

A spokesman for Maloney, Paul Blank, defended her actions then and now. “Voters deserve a choice. Candidates have to qualify to get on the ballot to run. They’re not related.”

Mr. Blank also said, “The fact that they didn’t qualify to get on the ballot has nothing to do with Carolyn Maloney.”

Jereski, in particular, may not agree.

In 2004, he filed 2,166 signatures, 916 more than was needed to appear on the ballot in the Democratic primary. But after Maloney supporters combed through his filing, they managed to disqualify 920 of them, leaving Jereski four signatures shy of the legal minimum requirement.

In response, Mr. Jereski tried taking Maloney and her supporters to court.

According to an affidavit filed with the State Supreme Court of New York, Maloney aides said she was “in Asia,” and therefore could not be contacted.

The process server who filed the affidavit, Robert D’Amato, said he went to Maloney’s legislative office on August 9, 2004, and spoke with “Minna Elias, Maloney’s Chief of Staff. I asked Minna Elias if I could speak with Carolyn B. Maloney as well. Ms. Elias stated to me that Carolyn B. Maloney was in Asia at the time. Elias further declared that she had no fax or phone number where Carolyn B. Maloney could be reached.”

Other aides were just as unhelpful. Mr. D’Amato said he left “the papers on a stack of boxes” in front of another aide, Estelle Head.

D’Amato had a more eventful time when he went to Ms. Maloney’s campaign office at 24 East 93rd Street later that day.

“I knocked on the door of the campaign office Suite 1B. Micah Z. Kellner asked ‘Who is it?’ I responded loudly that my name was Alfred and I was a volunteer. He asked again who it was several times although I answered in a voice adequate for him to hear each time,” wrote D’Amato. “Finally, he pronounced loudly, ‘No, you’re not! Go Away!’

“I waited outside of the office on the stairs above the landing where the office door is. I overheard Micah Kellner in phone conversations, stating the following:

“3:05 p.m. ‘They’re trying to serve me personally.’” And later “ ‘What if he doesn’t serve me personally?’ ”

Mr. D’Amato said that he affixed the court papers on the door and left. He said he also faxed the papers to Ms. Maloney’s Washington, D.C., office, taped them to the front door of her home, as well as the apartment doors of several aides.

Three days later, an independent referee, Leslie Lowenstein, ruled that Jereski would not be reinstated to the ballot, and that D’Amato’s affidavit could not be verified since he failed to personally appear in court on August 11 to substantiate the affidavit.

Lowenstein ruled that D’Amato’s affidavit insufficiently described his efforts to serve Maloney and her aides, noting, for example, that the aide to Maloney, Estelle Head, was described with an approximate age of 55, but the affidavit “does not recite the remaining descriptive requirements set fourth at CPLR [SECTION SYMBOL] 306(b) including height, weight and color of skin.”

The papers D’Amato tried to serve others did not include the words “Personal and Confidential,” wrote Lowenstein. D’Amato also did not use the United States Postal Service, but rather Fed Ex, which the courts do not consider a valid method of delivery.

Ultimately, Jereski was not restored to the ballot.

Skurnik said Maloney’s behavior is not logically inconsistent with her argument that the voting public deserves a primary against Gillibrand.

“If you knock someone off the ballot, that doesn’t mean you oppose democracy,” he said in a telephone interview. “It’s just you’re following the rules. They didn’t knock this guy off on technicalities. It was he didn’t meet the minimum requirement of signatures.”

Skurnik knows a lot about verifying signatures on petitions. His company invented the software for it. When it was first launched in 1994, it was called “Cyber Match.”

“We invented it in 1994 when Eliot Spitzer was the outsider” and running for the first time as attorney general, said Skurnik. “It was used to check his signatures to make sure they were good coming in. Then we realized we could run it the other way, and check if signatures were bad.”

It’s now part of the product Skurnik and Osnow call their “Lincoln Program,” which they’ve used with Maloney and other candidates. The cost is “approximately a few thousand bucks,” said Skurnik. “I think they’ve used it whenever they’ve been involved in a challenge.”

Blank, the Maloney spokesman, said there was nothing contradictory with Maloney wanting to challenge Gillibrand in a primary and Maloney preventing opponents from appearing on the ballot.

“It’s totally consistent,” he said.

When I suggested that having supporters successfully block challengers from getting on the ballot is not in keeping with the message of providing voters with more choices, Blank said, “No, that’s ridiculous. Voters deserve a choice. Candidates have to qualify to get on the ballot to run. They’re not related.”

After repeating this point, Blank went further. “She’d welcome a primary from any candidate who’d qualify to get on the ballot.” Referring to Jereski, Blank said, “This person didn’t qualify to get on the ballot. That has nothing to do with her. That is a failure of the person to qualify to get on the ballot, which is required in order to run.”

Referring to the other would-be challengers, Blank said, “The fact that they didn’t qualify to get on the ballot has nothing to do with Carolyn Maloney.”

“Carolyn Maloney believes voters deserve a choice. Carolyn Maloney also believes that you have to qualify to get on the ballot in order to give voters a choice.

“It’s dictated by law,” said Blank.

When I suggested that filing objections to opponents' petitions is not dictated by law, Blank replied, “No, but if they didn’t qualify, they didn’t qualify.”

In a follow-up email, Blank wrote, “It should be pointed out Congresswoman Maloney was re-elected with 81% of the vote -- tremendous support. Compare that to Gillibrand who, based on public polling, is an incumbent senator who is losing a potential primary challenge to a candidate who hasn't even begun to campaign.”

Blank, referring to Jereski, wrote, “What does Congresswoman Maloney have to do with this candidate’s failure to qualify to get on the ballot?”

It starts with O'Donnell, the bill's sponsor, agreeing to yield to Tedisco, saying, "For the congressman, anything."

"I wish," Tedisco replied, referencing his recent loss to Scott Murphy in good humor. "Do you have 700 votes in the back of your trunk?"

"I'm a Democrat from New York City, you bet I do," O'Donnell replied.

Tedisco, sitting in the back row at the opposite side of the chamber, then asked O'Donnell if the legislation would permit polygamy.

O'Donnell replied that it would not. Tedisco eventually made his point that "what I see here is someone trying to fit into marriage a new definition that fits their agenda and their lifestyle. But when we move to another level, we have a boundary here."

His boundary, he said, would be at a man and woman. "Those who are being bisexual and say, 'I want to marry a woman and I want to marry a man,' are saying to you: you're being discriminatory."

The members I was sitting next to started to murmur.

Assemblyman Micah Kellner, who is bisexual, and unmarried, rose to clarify the point: There would still only be one wedding per bisexual person. And he would love to attend. Heterosexual or homosexual.

"I don't need a plus-one," he said. "I'm going to meet someone at the wedding no matter what."

The result--not a surprise, but a wider margin than in previous years--was greeted with applause from advocates in the overlooking balconies as well as the members on the floor who supported the measure. There were kisses and hugs for the chamber's three openly gay members--Matt Titone, Deborah Glick and Danny O'Donnell, who carried the bill--as well as Micah Kellner, who is openly bisexual.

Now it's up to the Senate, where passage is in doubt.

Six assembly members were absent for the vote: Karim Camara, David Gantt, Carl Heastie, Marge Markey, Grace Meng and Marc Molinaro. Additionally, Crystal Peoples did not vote. Since 2007, when the measure passed 85-61, five members changed from no to yes. They are Tim Gordon, Sandra Galef, Janet Duprey, Fred Thiele and Bob Reilly. (Peoples voted yes in 2007, so it's 85+5-1, for those of you doing math at home.)

People are gravitating down State Street to O'Donnell's engagement party.

Kallos, in a brief telephone chat, declined to comment.

The East Side political establishment seems to be lining up behind another candidate in the race, Dan Quart, a lawyer who raised $42,585 and got contributions from Micah Kellner, an Assemblyman on the East Side, Brice Peyre, an aide to Representative Carolyn Maloney, a power broker in that part of the world, and Trudy Mason, a Democratic operative who normally doesn't break far from the party.

The request is motivated by two facts:

The first is that the financial disclosure forms lawmakers file with the state are often so heavily redacted before they're made public that, for the purposes of transparency, they're essentially useless. (Anthony Seminerio, for example, was filling his forms out properly right up until he was indicted for soliciting money from a hospital seeking state aid.)

The other fact is that the whiting-out practice has become nearly universal. Of the 212 state lawmakers, only Assemblyman Micah Kellner has filed an unredacted form with state officials.

One down, 211 to go. 

“The congestion pricing plan proposed by Mayor Bloomberg failed to gain approval in the State Legislature in the spring,” said Kellner, who was a vocal proponent of congestion pricing. "Neither the plan’s supporters nor its critics seem to have a firm idea of what to do next.”

Before introducing the panelists, he explained that they had invited a representative from the M.T.A. (“Just so it didn’t seem like we were M.T.A.-bashing"), but the authority “chose not to participate.”

The evening's guests included labor lawyer Theodore Kheel (later introduced as “a great hero from the last century in mass transit”), Gene Russianoff of the NYPIRG Straphangers Campaign and Jeffrey Zupan from the Regional Plan Association. They sat onstage in front of an audience of about 40, passing two semi-effective microphones back and forth.

“I personally supported congestion pricing as well as the millionaires' tax,” Kellner said, “because I believe New York is really facing a traffic and mass transit crisis requiring decisive action.”

He then passed both microphones to Kheel, who is 93 years old, and whose past in New York’s transit agencies is legendary. Kheel also made headlines recently when he proposed using revenue from congestion pricing to make mass transit totally free.

On the politics of congestion pricing, Kheel said, “The promotion, I thought, was in the wrong order. If you start out with free transit, you start out with something people would welcome.”

Russianoff said, “The M.T.A. is in the middle of a gigantic financial crisis. I don’t believe they’re crying wolf, I believe they have tremendous problems.”

He went on to say that only once before, in 1980 and '81, were there fare hikes during consecutive years (as there likely will be in 2007 and 2008) and that the M.T.A. is the fifth largest borrower in the U.S.

Jeffery Zupan took the microphone and said with some amusement, “The M.T.A. is in deep doo-doo right now and it’s only going to get worse."

After the panel, Zupan told me he thought Bloomberg was brave to have raised the issue of congestion pricing. "People thought it was politically impossible,” Zupan commented.

He thinks the problem was in the timing.

“It was kept pretty secret, so it dropped, with PlaNYC, like a bombshell, because they didn’t share thinking."

I caught Kellner on his way out and asked him about Bloomberg's legacy.

“The two things he’s going to be known for as mayor are going to be more tickets and garbage trucks,” Kellner said. Later, he added that he would also be remembered for "things falling out of the sky.”

But at least one of the congresswoman's would-be heirs is going to be ready whenever the possibility does arise of moving up in Maloney World.

In an e-mail exchange between Assemblyman Jonathan Bing and Democratic operative Allan Roskoff, which was forwarded to me earlier this week by a reader who wasn't part of the exchange, Bing wrote that he was going to show up and speak at a particular meeting of a political club “because Maloney is speaking there at the same time and I like to appear in as many places as possible as her right hand guy.”

It's a strategy that makes sense, and which has doubtless occurred to local officials other than Bing, given Maloney's track record of helping allies get elected.

If and when the 15-year incumbent decides to move on, other possible candidates include State Senator Liz Krueger, City Council members Dan Garodnick and Jessica Lappin (a former adviser to ex-Maloney staffer Gifford Miller) and, assuming the vacancy doesn't come up anytime too soon, freshly elected Assemblyman (and former Maloney aide) Micah Kellner.

“He’s been a friend to N.O.W., a friend to women, and a friend to the women’s movement and has a long record of supporting women’s issues,” N.Y.C. N.O.W. president and Hillary Clinton backer Sonia Ossorio told me just now. “I think Ted Kennedy has been a tremendous friend to women.”

That's a far cry from what Pappas said about Kennedy, in part:

“Women have forgiven Kennedy, stuck up for him, stood by him, hushed the fact that he was late in his support of Title IX, the ERA, the Family Leave and Medical Act to name a few.”

When reached in her Albany office, Pappas said she was “inundated” with calls from reporters and would get back to me.

The rift over Kennedy isn’t the first time Pappas and Ossorio have put out conflicting messages (see Greg Camp versus Micah Kellner for Assembly). The national organization of N.O.W. has yet to weigh in (when reached by phone an employee said they would have a statement out shortly), but Pappas has a record of over-the-top rhetoric.

For example, the January 11th press release she wrote, headlined “Psychological Gang Bang of Hillary is Proof We Need a Woman President.”

UPDATE: Here’s the statement from N.O.W. national president Kim Gandy, which will go on the group‘s website shortly. “The National Organization for Women has enormous respect and admiration for Sen. Edward Kennedy (D- Mass.). For decades Sen. Kennedy has been a friend of NOW, and a leader and fighter for women's civil and reproductive rights, and his record shows that.

“Though the National Organization for Women Political Action Committee has proudly endorsed Sen. Hillary Clinton for president, we respect Sen. Kennedy's endorsement. We continue to encourage women everywhere to express their opinions and exercise their right to vote.”

"This is the biggest flip-flop ever for him," Kellner says.