Following Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s selection of his delegates to the Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction, both Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and Speaker of the House John Boehner have named their choices for the committee. From the Senate are Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania, Jon Kyl of Arizona, and Rob Portman of Ohio. The selection of Toomey, a one-time president of the Club for Growth, is likely a nod to his broad Tea Party support, and while Portman previously served as Director of the Office of Management and Budget under President George W. Bush, Kyl is notorious for walking out of budget talks with Vice President Joe Biden. On the House side are Jeb Hensarling of Texas, Dave Camp, and Fred Upton, both of Michigan. Hensarling, chairman of the House Republican Conference, will serve alongside Senator Patty Murray (D-WA) as co-chair of the committee. Camp served on the Simpson-Bowles Commission, although he voted against all his recommendations, and Upton serves as chairman on the Committee on Energy and Commerce. All six appointees have signed Americans for Tax Reform’s Taxpayer Protection Pledge. [National Journal]

Senator Olympia Snowe (R-ME) has come out strongly against the hyperpartisan environment that led to the debt ceiling debacle, saying she was embarrassed by lawmakers’ behavior and calling the current Congress “the worst” she’s ever seen in her political life. Snowe, a moderate Republican, is being targeted by multiple Tea Party challengers for the 2012 primary. [Huffington Post]

A group of moderate to conservative Democrats in the Blue Dog Caucus, including Jim Cooper of Tennessee, Henry Cuellar of Texas, Michael Michaud of Maine, and Mike McIntyre of North Carolina, have signed a letter urging Speaker Boehner to cancel the House of Representatives’s August recess so as to address the fiscal crisis currently facing the country. [The Hill]

For the third time in the last week, the Dow Jones Industrial Average plunged by more than 500 points Wednesday, falling 4.63% to 10,718 points, a drop of 520 from the previous day. This brings the total decline in the index to more than 2,000 points in the last three weeks. Other American indices performed similarly Wednesday, with the NASDAQ and S&P 500 both dropping by around 4%. [Huffington Post]

Standard & Poor’s has released some of its specific reasons for downgrading the United States to a AA+ bond rating, and it is more political than fiscal. Citing the political gridlock in Washington, and in particular the Republicans’ unwillingness to compromise on raising revenues, the report sends the message that S&P does not believe that any sort of meaningful debt-reduction compromise can come out of the current political environment in Washington. [Reuters]

On a deadline to appoint members to the bipartisan Super Congress by next Tuesday, August 16, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid appointed Patty Murray of Washington, Max Baucus of Montana, and John Kerry of Massachusetts to the panel, designating Murray as co-chair. Murray, currently head of the Democratic Senate Campaign Committee and a senior member of the Senate’s Budget Committee, is expected to chair the new committee, formally known as the Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction, alongside a yet-to-be-named House Republican. Baucus was selected for his position as chair of the Finance Committee (and he has been a member of several bipartisan coalitions, including the original Gang of Six in 2009), while John Kerry, who was the party’s 2004 Presidential nominee, was chosen because of his seniority within the caucus. [National Journal]

Following its near-catastrophic 634-point drop the day before, the Dow Jones Industrial Average rallied by 429 points (3.98%) on Tuesday. Mirroring its rise was a 4.7% increase in the S&P 500. Price levels had been inconsistent over the course of the day, with the final surge resulting from the Federal Reserve Bank’s mid-afternoon announcement that interest rates would remain very low through the middle of 2013. Early Wednesday trading saw increases in stock indices in Japan, South Korea, and Australia. [NY Times]

Following Standard & Poor’s decision to downgrade United States debt from AAA to AA+. the Securities and Exchange Commission has released, in part through an 84-page letter to S&P, guidelines on changing rating agencies’ reporting requirements; perhaps unsurprisingly, S&P has not reacted well to the proposal. Notably, the regulations would require such groups to state publicly and on their website when an error has been found in their calculations. This particular stipulation has been met with ire from Standard & Poor’s in large part because the US government has accused the agency of making a $2 trillion error in its calculations that the Treasury Department believes should have affected the decision to downgrade American debt. The entire set of regulations is 517 pages long and is more broadly aimed at reforming the ratings agencies that massively overestimated the dependability of certain loans in the months and years leading up to the 2008 fiscal crisis. [Reuters]

In a moment of stunning irony, the S&P downgrade may have brought some level of bipartisan agreement to the halls of Congress. Members from both sides of the aisle, including some with ideologies as disparate as those of Darrell Issa (R-CA) and Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) are calling on investigations as to the why and wherefores of the downgrade decision, including whether or not S&P may have benefited from it. Overall, the consensus seems to be that ratings agencies should play a smaller role in the United States’s government and economy. [Wall Street Journal]

In other government dysfunction news, the results of the Wisconsin State Senate recall elections are in, and though Republicans will maintain control of that body, Democrats have picked up two seats in that body, though they may lose more as two Democratic senators are up for recall elections on August 16. Although the results are, on the surface, a loss for Wisconsin Democrats, there has been speculation that the close results of some races may bode well for an effort to recall Republican governor Scott Walker [MSNBC]