Via Politico, a media metaphor for the state of “negotiations.” There’s nothing left to say except the occasional “frank” reiteration of positions, so why go through the motions of dialogue? All that’s left is for Boehner to capitulate and then everybody goes home for Christmas.

Since there’s nothing left to say, let me offer a few poll numbers instead. Promising…

…and not so promising:

Note the Republican numbers. Pew has a new poll out today too and that doesn’t look too promising either:

The killer numbers there come from independents, but the fact that even 37 percent of Republicans agree that the GOP’s not making an effort to compromise gives you a sense of who’ll be blamed by the wider public if we topple over the cliff. Not to go full eeyore on you either but here’s one that bodes badly even for the GOP’s “Plan B,” in which they simply allow the Bush tax cuts for the rich to lapse and then pound the table for major cuts in February as a condition of raising the debt ceiling:

If Boehner et al. decide to go to the wall on the debt ceiling next year, they had better get a boatload of concessions for it to make the potential fallout in 2014 worth it.

I’ll leave you with this from Philip Klein to put all of the above in perspective: “Democrats have gotten away with promoting the fantasy that the nation can balance the budget by making modest adjustments to spending while protecting 98 percent of the country from tax increases. But they won’t be able to get away with this fairy tale forever. At some point, reality will set in, and the reality is that in order to protect entitlements from major changes, Democrats will have to back massive across the board tax hikes. Let’s see how polls turn out when middle class Americans are asked whether they want to pay significantly higher taxes in order to minimize cuts to entitlement programs, or how they’ll feel when interest rates and inflation are soaring as a result of the national debt.”