In the first of what will be a closely watched selection process for a powerful new deficit panel, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid announced he will appoint Democratic Sens. Patty Murray of Washington, Max Baucus of Montana and John Kerry of Massachusetts as his three choices for a super committee charged with finding more than $1 trillion in spending cuts by the end of this year. 
 
 Murray will serve as co-chairwoman of the 12-member panel. House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) will select a member to co-chair the committee and two other panelists, as required by the debt-limit agreement signed into law by President Barack Obama last week. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) will each select three additional members. 
 
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 “The Joint Select Committee has been charged with forging the balanced, bipartisan approach to deficit reduction that the American people, the markets and rating agencies like Standard & Poor’s are demanding,” Reid said in a statement. “To achieve that goal, I have appointed three senators who each posses an expertise in budget matters, a commitment to a balanced approach and a track record of forging bipartisan consensus.” 
 
 Reid’s three picks are loyal to the majority leader and are intended to show the Nevada Democrat is serious about forging a bipartisan deal to head off $1.2 trillion in spending cuts required under the debt deal. The super committee was Reid’s contribution to the bipartisan agreement to end the debt-limit fight. 
 
 A senior appropriator and Budget Committee member, Murray is also the chairwoman of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, which has made the GOP’s focus on overhauling Medicare a centerpiece of the 2012 campaign. Baucus is the chairman of the powerful Finance Committee, while Kerry — the 2004 Democratic presidential nominee — has been lobbying for a spot. 
 
 But the choice of Murray has already spawned anger from Republicans, who called it a blatantly political move aimed at filling coffers for the Democratic campaign committee. Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus called on Reid to withdraw the appointment immediately. 
 
 “The select committee is no place for someone whose top priority is fundraising and politics,” Priebus said. 
 
 Reid and Pelosi had been considering whether to install candidates who will draw a hard-line against deep entitlement cuts, particularly if Republicans don’t bend on new taxes. The Democratic leaders want loyalists who won’t give the panel majority support for a cuts-only approach, which could target popular programs like Medicare and Social Security. 
 
 “The No. 1 criteria should be someone who fights for revenues, and if Republicans continue to rule out revenues, then the Democrats have to play proper defense in response,” said a senior Democratic aide. 
 
 In a joint statement, Kerry, Baucus and Murray said they are serious about answering the call to “step beyond partisanship and politics” and achieve a “balanced, pragmatic and practical” solution to the soaring national debt. 
 
 In an email sent to her colleagues Monday evening, Pelosi said her caucus is committed to “protecting” Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security — and said that the new panel should deliberate in public settings so that it achieves a “balanced” approach to deficit reduction. 
 
 “Many of you have expressed your interest in serving on the joint committee,” Pelosi told her colleagues. “I have and will be reaching out to each of you before making any decision.” ||||| Web wide crawl with initial seedlist and crawler configuration from March 2011. This uses the new HQ software for distributed crawling by Kenji Nagahashi. 
 
 What’s in the data set: 
 
 
 
 Crawl start date: 09 March, 2011 
 
 Crawl end date: 23 December, 2011 
 
 Number of captures: 2,713,676,341 
 
 Number of unique URLs: 2,273,840,159 
 
 Number of hosts: 29,032,069 
 
 The seed list for this crawl was a list of Alexa’s top 1 million web sites, retrieved close to the crawl start date. We used Heritrix (3.1.1-SNAPSHOT) crawler software and respected robots.txt directives. The scope of the crawl was not limited except for a few manually excluded sites. 
 
 However this was a somewhat experimental crawl for us, as we were using newly minted software to feed URLs to the crawlers, and we know there were some operational issues with it. For example, in many cases we may not have crawled all of the embedded and linked objects in a page since the URLs for these resources were added into queues that quickly grew bigger than the intended size of the crawl (and therefore we never got to them). We also included repeated crawls of some Argentinian government sites, so looking at results by country will be somewhat skewed. 
 
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– Three down, nine to go. Harry Reid made his three picks for the bipartisan "super committee" that will try to come up with $1.2 trillion of cuts in about 3 months. Reid picked Patty Murray, who will serve as co-chair with a yet-to-be-named Republican, along with John Kerry and Max Baucus. Politico sees the choices as a sign that the Senate majority leader is serious about getting a deal struck. Mitch McConnell, John Boehner, and Nancy Pelosi will each add three picks of their own. At least seven of the 12 will need to agree on a proposal by Thanksgiving if they hope to have it signed by the president by Dec. 23, notes the National Journal. Failure triggers across-the-board cuts. Click to read how Daily Intel wishes the first three were announced, or here to see Jon Stewart's take on the committee.