The Democrat and Chronicle has an editorial commending Eric Massa for having an open town hall meeting, and dinging Slaughter, Lee and Maffei for choosing "telephone town halls" and other types of non-public meetings.
This brings up a point on the politics of protests: the reaction is just as important as the action. Noisy or unruly protests are provocative events. If the target of the protest doesn't over-react, but instead addresses the protest head-on (and calmly), a lot of the anticipated political fallout just doesn't happen.
Anyone watching the 29th district in the past couple of years learned this lesson, which was taught by a couple of peace activists and Randy Kuhl. An unruly action (a sit-in) by a few fringe elements provoked a major reaction (locking doors, canceling town halls). So far, this hasn't happened in the 29th in 2009.