Sens. Michael Bennet (D-CO) and Lamar Alexander (R-TN) have put together a bipartisan back-up plan in case a deal on the fiscal cliff can’t be reached in time. This is the same basic framework agreed to in 2011 that created the fiscal cliff to begin with.

Yesterday, John Boehner appeared to wave a white flag on talks aimed at resolving the fiscal cliff. Harry Reid reacted to that with disappointment, saying that there’s still time for a deficit reduction deal. But the real endgame – at least for the lame duck session – is coming into focus, with one of those “gang of” eight groups trying to negotiate a six month deal.

Is there a way to rescue Medicaid in Red States? After all, if Republican governors value their positions, they’ll fall in line with the prevailing opinion of their hardcore base, which clearly falls on the side of rejecting government-run health care and opting out. So what are the options here?

Besides essentially upholding the entire Affordable Care Act, the most important news coming out of the Supreme Court decision is that it limited how the federal government can implement the Medicaid expansion. The law would provide money for states to expand Medicaid for everyone up to 138 percent of the Federal poverty level (FPL). This could have huge policy implications given that the Medicaid expansion is supposed to be responsible for roughly half of the law’s coverage expansion.

The Court concluded that the federal government can’t force states to take part in the Medicaid expansion by threatening to end their current Medicaid funding if they don’t.

Given his steady support of Mitch McConnell, it’s a fair guess that Lamar Alexander truly believes that democrats and the people they claim to represent are not entitled to govern. Or, as Corey Robin puts it: “Submission is their first duty, agency, the prerogative of the elite.”

News this week out of Japan that workers at the crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant have detected extremely high levels of radiation in and around reactor 1. The first incident, on August 1, pinned the Geiger counter at 10 sieverts (1000 rem)—yes, that’s as high as the device could measure, so that number is a minimum—and was taken at the base of a ventilation stack. The second reading, the following day, clocked in at five sieverts per hour inside the reactor building.

I have yet to read an explanation for the discovery of the second reading, but the initial, sky-high measurement on Monday has me and many others scratching heads. A thousand rem is not some little ho-hum number. A half-hour of exposure at that level is fatal in a matter of days, I am told. Where did that radiation come from?

Paul Kane has a piece in Sunday’s Washington Post that seems to be the kind of take on the Senate rules reform fight you’d expect someone who hasn’t been following it at all and gets most of his information from lobbyists. He accepts the contributions of senior Senate aides that the effort led by some Democrats to change the Senate rules will fail because “party leaders want to protect the right of the Senate’s minority party to sometimes force a supermajority of 60 votes to approve legislation.” But of course, the rules changes on the table would still allow that right. This confusion may indeed sink the Merkley/Harkin/Udall effort, but it’s a willful confusion.

Sen. Jeff Merkley acknowledged that one component of the consensus plan on Senate rules reform put together by him, Tom Udall and Tom Harkin would probably get tweaked, and that the biggest concern for skittish Democratic lawmakers was changing the rules at all, lest they be changed on them when Republicans take over. Which is kind of an amazing commentary on the state of the Democratic Party, when you think about it.

Bob Schieffer is sitting on a scoop he needs to share with the world, unless his rules for ‘off-the-record’ are the same as the late Tim Russert: everything is always off-the-record unless the newsmaker specifically grants ‘permission to use.’

Tennessee’s Lamar Alexander and Bob Corker are going to bat for a major business in Tennessee while blocking employees from unionizing.