America's chattering classes haven't hesitated to weigh in on Friday's downgrade by Standard & Poor's of U.S. creditworthiness. S&P's shift from a AAA to a AA+ for the nation had politicians and analysts criticizing the ratings agency over its methodology and blasting Washington's lawmakers for getting us to this point.

Following is a collection of some of the strongest public comments so far on the nation's latest debt crisis:

Maryland governor Martin O’Malley, the chairman of the Democratic Governors Association, put the blame on Republicans and the party's backing within the Tea Party. He said on ABC's This Week:

One has to find understandable their pessimism about our inability to come together on the most important issue facing our country, which is how do we create jobs. We need a balanced approach and the extremism, the Tea Party obstructionism here in Washington, is keeping us from restoring that balanced approach America has always used of investing in the future, investing in job creation, and also being fiscally responsible at the same time.

Senator Jeff Sessions of Alabama, the top Republican on the Senate Finance Committee, came to a predictably opposite conclusion on This Week:

Raising taxes is what ‘balanced plan’ means, that is plain to every American by now. The administration wants to raise taxes so they can permanently implant a larger level of spending. They have increased domestic discretionary spending 24 percent in two years. This is unthinkable. So we’ve got a problem — we’ve got to bring that spending down, not increase the burden on the private sector.

While politicians excoriated each other, pundits excoriated politicians, and S&P.

Jack Hough, writing in the Wall Street Journal, had this thought:

In the long run, the downgrade will hopefully make voters properly angry. It would have been worse if Washington's dangerous clownery of the past month had brought no consequences. The challenges facing the country aren't nearly as grave as they're made out to be, and the fixes aren't especially painful. Costs for defense and healthcare, the two biggest sources of bloat, must be slashed. Social Security needs a higher retirement age at minimum and means testing at most. The $1 trillion of spending hiding in the tax code must come out; capping tax breaks at 2% of income is a good place to start. These and similar reforms aren't right-leaning or left-leaning. They're math-leaning. It's time for policy makers to drop the dogma and start using the same cold calculus as S&P.

Tom Friedman of The New York Times sees in the downgrade, and the debate that preceded it, evidence of a nation in slow decline. Here's the lead of his column Sunday:

In the wake of the hugely disappointing budget deal and the S.& P.’s debt downgrade, maybe we need to hang a new sign in the immigration arrival halls at all U.S. ports and airports. It could simply read: “Welcome. You are entering the United States of America. Past performance is not necessarily indicative of future returns.”

Nick Paumgarten of The New Yorker sees irony in the fact that a ratings agency that missed the disastrous mortgage debacle is hammering the United States, even if the S&P analysts are right:

It’s rich that Standard & Poor’s would lower the boom on the United States government. There are many people in the financial industry and elsewhere who were surprised that the government didn’t put S. & P. and the other ratings agencies out of business after the meltdown of 2008, for their infamous role in polishing all those mortgage-backed turds.

What do you think about the S&P's determination, how Washington is handling the debt crisis and how Wall Street should react? Offer you views below.