CNN's Drew Griffin says when it comes to safety, operators of Japan's quake-damaged nuclear plants have lied before.

Ryan McDonald, an American who teaches English in Japan, reports on conditions following Friday's massive earthquake.

Check out our OFF-SET interview with Ryan, exclusive to the "In The Arena" blog, and Ryan's amazing video of Friday's earthquake (below):

CNN's Anderson Cooper reports tsunami-drifted debris is piled ten feet high in a rice field near Sendai Port, Japan.

Economist Jeffrey Sachs says Japan's economy should bounce back, despite global concerns following a massive earthquake.

Nuclear expert Jim Walsh reacts to a new explosion at the earthquake-damaged Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant.

Here's what's on my mind today–(Monday, 3-14-11)

1. Putting the radioactive steam releases in Japan into context, William Tucker in the WSJ says, "these produce radiation at about the level of one dental X-ray in the immediate vicinity and quickly dissipate."

2.  Also from Tucker: “researchers have spent 30 years trying to find health effects from steam releases at Three Mile Island and have come up with nothing.” 

3.  And yet, the U.S. hasn’t built a new nuclear plant since 1979, after the Three Mile Island meltdown. 

4.  Meanwhile, Joe Lieberman says to put the brakes on nuclear plants and Ed Markey calls for a moratorium on new nuclear plants.

5.  Anne-Marie Slaughter wonderfully lays out all of the arguments against acting in Libya and attempts to rebut them. But I’m still not convinced.   FULL POST

ONLY ON THE BLOG: We’re checking back in with Ryan McDonald, an American who teaches English in Japan. On Friday’s show, he talked about the amazing video he shot of the devastating earthquake.

He is scheduled to appear again In the Arena on Monday, March 14, 2011.

How are you doing today? Do you have access to food, water, basic necessities?

Today is 100x better than Friday. We have access to everything, however there are still long lines at grocery stores and not all restaurants are open. Gas is limited to about 2.5 gallons per car and there are long lines down the street sometimes as long as 30-40 cars. We are staying with friends in Kitakata (key tah kah tah) and feel normal apart from the impending danger and meltdown. FULL POST

ONLY ON THE BLOG: Answering our five OFF-SET questions is CNN iReporter Dan Szczuka, 25, an English teacher at a rural junior high school in Fukushima prefecture. He shot dramatic footage Friday during the earthquake. He was finishing up lunch with the other teachers “when all of a sudden all of their phones started ringing. It was the early earthquake warning system.”

Where were you when the earthquake struck?

I was right outside the staff room at my junior high school that I teach at. 

CLICK HERE to see Dan's iReport. FULL POST

Today’s Number of the Day is 6.2 percent.

That’s how much Tokyo’s Nikkei index dropped this morning in the aftermath of earthquake/tsunami/nuclear meltdown concerns.

Not surprisingly, this is the index's biggest one-day drop since late 2008 in the midst of the financial crisis.

Nobody really knows what the long-term impact on the Japanese economy will be.

So to that extent, people are trading on an emotional response–with news breaking every moment.

The prefecture with the greatest damage constitutes only about 2 percent of Japan’s GDP in total, although certain critical sectors—such as automobiles and electronics–have important production facilities in the devastated region.

Obviously, the nuclear facility shutdowns create havoc throughout the energy sectors in Japan–and the impact is still impossible to know.

The U.S. markets did not open Monday with any significant movement downward, indicating a general belief that as horrific as this tragedy is, the global economic impact, barring some unexpected nuclear cataclysm, will not be that great.

Question for the long-term: will the emerging consensus that nuclear power should be a significantly larger part of our energy portfolio begin to dissipate? FULL POST

ONLY ON THE BLOG: Answering today’s six OFF-SET questions is David Sirota, author of the new book, “Back to Our Future: How the 1980s Explain the World We Live in Now—Our Culture, Our Politics, Our Everything.”

Sirota is a journalist, nationally syndicated newspaper columnist, and host of a daily talk show on KKZN-AM in Denver. He is also a senior editor at “In These Times” magazine and a contributor to The Huffington Post.

Sirota will appear In the Arena in the near future.

You begin your exploration by making the case that the political and cultural references from the 1980s have not only become cool again, but may be a way to explain our present-day issues and conflicts, and even influencing our thinking today? Please give us a few then-and-now examples?

 Consider, for instance, the Tea Party – a revival of what the New York Times called “modern Boston Tea Party” revolts against taxes on the eve of the 1980s. Notably, today’s iteration of this uprising regularly laces its rhetoric with revivalist paeans to the Eisenhower Era. Summarizing the sentiment, one Tea Partier said: “Things we had in the fifties were better."

This rhetoric has resonated because for many, it no longer stirs memories of the actual 1950s of Jim Crow laws, gender inequality and religious bigotry. Instead, it evokes the sanitized idea of “The Fifties” that was originally created in the 1980s through movies like Back to the Future, Stand By Me and Hoosiers, television shows like Happy Days and Laverne & Shirley, and rockabilly greaser bands like the Stray Cats. FULL POST