Yesterday, I received two interesting tidbits about the All-American Presidential Forums on PBS that will be happening this evening. The first was in a discussion with Robert Cox of the Media Bloggers Association (MBA). It was through the MBA that I received credentials for the Libby Trial. This time, they are working with PBS to credential bloggers to cover the Presidential Forums.

I have mixed feelings about credentialing processes. Too often they can be used to re-enforce a status-quo of who’s in and who’s out. MBA has done a great job of bringing in some of the bloggers that I consider some of the great under-recognized bloggers.

Faye Anderson will be blogging at Anderson@Large. I believe I first met Faye at the Media Giraffe summit back in 2006. She is a bright and engaging blogger, whom I’m pleased to see will be speaking at BlogHer at the end of July.

Another great blogger from New York City that will be there is Liza Sabater. Liza writes at culturekitchen, and The Daily Gotham. It seems like I run into at Liza at every blogging event, and she is always bringing up important questions. I really look forward to her coverage of the forums.

Terrance Heath, of the The Republic of T. is going to be there. I first met Terrance through the Progressive Bloggers Alliance and we were on a panel together in DC a few years ago. I haven’t seen him in a few years, but I still enjoy reading his blog.

Then, there are bloggers that I learned about through MBA. La Shawn Barber and I were supposed to be covering the Libby trial at the same time, and I started reading her blog because of this. We do not agree politically, and despite putting in lines like “Liberals are such crybabies”, she usually writes pretty insightful material.

I think I first stumbled across Kim Pearson through MBA. However, she writes so many interesting things, I may well have first read her writing about Second Life, some sort of media reform activities or something else. I’m glad she’ll be blogging the Presidential forum and I’m also glad to see that, like Faye, she will be speaking at BlogHer.

Another blogger that I really enjoy reading that will be part of the credentialed bloggers is Pam Spaulding. I’ve never met Pam, but I really enjoy reading Pam’s House Blend.

There are several other bloggers that I’ve read here and there but don’t really know or follow. I look finding out more about them. In many ways, I think I might be more interested in hearing from the bloggers who are credentialed than from the candidates themselves. MBA has set up this page to aggregate the feeds of these bloggers. It looks like a page worth watching.

If that is not enough, Michael Forbes Wilcox writes that Governor Deval Patrick will appear in the televised presidential debate. It was Michael and his friend Lori that first introduced me to Gov. Patrick and I echo Gov. Dean’s comment about Gov. Patrick, "Governor Patrick is a rising star in the Democratic Party and an outstanding example of the strong leadership vision and values that our party offers to American people."

While I didn’t think much of Wolf Blitzer hogging the spotlight at the debates in New Hampshire, I do hope that we see a lot of Gov. Patrick during the forums.

So, I’m excited about the forums. I’m excited to see Gov. Patrick. I’m excited to what the bloggers will say. I’m even hopefully that the candidates will have something interesting to say.