They pretended to have been hopeful. “I thought it was an olive branch,” Paul Ryan said in the basement of the Capitol this afternoon, a few hours after he joined a cadre of House Republicans, at the behest of the President, at George Washington University for Obama’s policy speech. Instead — surprise! — the Republicans were …

Via Halperin, GOP presidential hopeful Tim Pawlenty is denouncing last week’s budget deal between the White House, Harry Reid and John Boehner. Pawlenty’s statement seizes upon rising conservative anger–Hannity led with this topic last night–over reports that many of the cuts amount to accounting sleight of hand:

The more we learn

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President Obama didn’t offer a lot of specifics about how he intends to close the federal budget deficit in his speech at GW Wednesday, but he did make one thing clear: he intends to go head-to-head with Republicans over taxes.

That makes political sense. If he’s going to go after $2 trillion in spending, as his aides say he will …

In Washington these days, you’re nobody if you don’t have your own deficit-reduction plan. Paul Ryan has people talking about his conservative blueprint. Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson have an establishment-centrist take. The Democratic left has its own alternative. And a bipartisan group of six senators is at work on still another …

Getting the government back to pre-Obama spending is a central tenet of the Republican budget agenda. The GOP’s proposals for 2011 and 2012 would put across-the-board domestic discretionary spending back at 2008 levels and Paul Ryan’s “Path” would freeze it there for five years. For the only two federal financial regulators subject to …

…its federal subsidy survives, notes my colleague James Poniewozik.

Once again in Washington, sound and fury signifies…. not much.

The AP suggests that accounting gimmicks make the cuts a lot smaller than their price tag implies.

A close look at the government shutdown-dodging agreement to cut federal spending by $38 billion reveals that lawmakers significantly eased the fiscal pain by pruning money left over from previous years, using accounting sleight of hand

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With just minutes to go before a midnight deadline, House Republicans and Senate Democrats announced they had struck a long-awaited deal to fund the government for the remainder of the fiscal year, averting a shutdown that would have furloughed hundreds of thousands of federal employees, stalled services for millions of Americans and …

It’s almost like bizarro New Year’s Eve in the Capitol. Staffers seem slightly punch-drunk from all the speculation and hearsay. Cable networks are splashing countdown clocks and breaking-news banners everywhere. (A deal might be close!) Lawmakers are running out of insulting metaphors; Chuck Schumer today characterized the Tea Party …