“I believe the probability is we’re going over the cliff and I think that would be horrible,” President Clinton’s Chief of Staff Erskine Bowles said at a Christian Science Monitor breakfast meeting yesterday. “It would be insane to breach this fiscal cliff, yet I think there is only a one-third possibility we’ll actually get something done before December 31.”

As gloomy as Bowles prediction sounds, it is, if anything, optimistic, if the latest reporting from Politico on the state of the negotiations between Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, and President Obama is to be believed.