I’m in the Grand Ballroom and the Yearly Kos Presidential Forum just started. Senator Gravel, Gov. Richardson, Sen. Dodd, Sen. Clinton, Sen. Edwards, Sen. Obama, and Rep. Kucinich walked into thunderous applause, though the two biggest rumbles were for Edwards and Obama.

Matt Bai of the New York Times is moderating the forum, with mcjoan of Daily Kos and Jeffrey Feldman of Frameshop are asking questions of the candidates. Bai recognized that Barack Obama is the birthday boy on the panel, and the room gave him a rousing rendition of “Happy Birthday.”

Richardson got the first question from mcjoan regarding his previous comments on the Supreme Court and abortion. It was a loaded question to start the forum off with a bang, but Richardson immediately said it was a mistake.

1:20 CST: mcjoan out of the gate again with a Supreme Court question for Dodd, and under what “extreme circumstance” he’d accept another Bush SC nominee. He said that he “believed” John Roberts when he said he’d uphold the constitution. But come on! We’ve believed Bush time and time again, and you really just can’t trust anymore.

1:22 – Ezra Klein is involved in a question to Hillary about what scars she has from the 1994 universal health debate. Her lessons are that 1. a plan is not enough, you need political strategy. 2. you need to build a coalition of groups who are affected, including health care professionals, and 3. tactical mistakes from ’94, but she “doesn’t have enough time to tell them all.” She calls it her “highest domestic priority.” Pretty good answer.

1:25 – My battery only has 40 minutes left.

1:28 – Edwards is responding to a question. I wasn’t listening to it because I was using my BlackBerry to take a picture of the room. The room is full of camera flashes. It feels like a press conference, but it’s just people with their digital camera, each documenting the forum on their own. It’s such an interesting sideproduct of a room full of citizen journalists: there’s a whole echelon of citizenphotojournalists.