Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Jose Antonio Vargas shares his experience as an undocumented immigrant in the U.S.

CLICK HERE to check out our fascinating OFF SET interview with Vargas, exclusive to the "In The Arena" blog!

Sen. Rob Portman (R-Ohio) says a "big shift in" in President Obama's tone "changed the dynamics" of debt-ceiling talks.

CNN's Jessica Yellin and Jeffrey Toobin discuss a report that U.S. Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner may leave his post. FULL POST

Media expert Dan Abrams, founder of Mediaite.com, supports MSNBC's suspension of analyst Mark Halperin for calling President Obama "a d**k." FULL POST

Rep. Joe Walsh (R-Illinois) says President Obama acts "like a ten-year-old" and is "in over his head."

NEW YORK (CNNMoney) - Tim Geithner is considering leaving his post as Secretary of the Treasury after a deal to raise the debt ceiling is reached, a source familiar with the discussion told CNN Thursday.

Geithner is the lone remaining member of President Obama's original economic team.  FULL POST

Eliot appears on "Your Money" this weekend, Saturday at 1 p.m. ET and Sunday at 3 p.m. ET.

In this excerpt from this week's show, he appears with Mort Zuckerman,  editor-in-chief of  U.S. News & World Report. They tell co-anchor Ali Velshi that entitlement cuts must be delayed to increase the quality of jobs.

The interview  also features Arianna Huffington, president and editor-in-chief of The Huffington Post Media Group.

ONLY ON THE BLOG: Answering today’s OFF-SET questions is Jose Antonio Vargas, award-winning multimedia journalist.

Most recently, he was a senior contributing editor at the Huffington Post, where he launched the Technology and College sections. He worked for The San Francisco Chronicle, The Philadelphia Daily News, and was a national political reporter and feature writer for the Washington Post, where he reported on the Internet's impact on politics.  In 2007, he was part of the Washington Post team that covered the Virginia Tech shootings and earned a Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News Reporting. He also wrote and co-produced the documentary film “The Other City,” about the HIV/AIDS epidemic in Washington,D.C.

Vargas was born in the Philippines in 1981 and came to live in the United States in 1993 at the age of 12.  This year, he started an online conversation about America’s immigration system which has become the website Define American.  But just last Sunday, in a dramatic first-person story in The New York Times Magazine, Vargas admitted for the first time that he is an illegal immigrant. 

Vargas is scheduled to appear In The Arena on Thursday, June 30, 2011.

One day, when you were 16, you drove your bicycle to the Department of Motor Vehicles in the San Francisco Bay area to get a driver’s permit. You handed the official your green card to prove you were a U.S. resident and she said, “This is a fake. Don’t come back here again.” From that point on, why did you feel you had to lie to friends and then employers?

 I did what I had to do in order to contribute to our society, which has meant paying taxes and being a responsible American. 

Did you try to become a U.S. citizen?

There has not been a reasonable path for citizenship - for me and millions like me. FULL POST

ONLY ON THE BLOG: In May, we featured an OFF-SET blog interview with Henry Velandia and Josh Vandiver of Princeton, New Jersey.  

Last year, Velandia, a dancer and dance teacher from Venezuela, and Vandiver, a Princeton graduate student and Ph.D candidate, were legally married in Connecticut. But under federal law—the Defense of Marriage Act—immigration authorities don’t recognize same-sex marriages and Velandia was denied legal residency in the United States. On May 6, an immigration judge temporarily halted Velendia’s deportation.

On Wednesday, June 29, 2011, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) asked the Immigration Court to "administratively close" Velandia’s deportation proceedings exercising their power of prosecutorial discretion.   ICE decided that it would no longer pursue the deportation and the judge agreed. FULL POST

ONLY ON THE BLOG: Answering today’s five OFF-SET questions is journalist/author Bette Dam, who has reported on Afghanistan and the effects of the military invasion in that country. Dam is an independent journalist working for Dutch and Australian media. She is author of ‘Expeditie Uruzgan: De weg van Hamid Karzai naar het paleis’ - (Expedition Uruzgan: Hamid Karzai’s Way into the Palace‘).

Dam first came to the country in 2006, on an embedded trip to the South of Afghanistan.  After that she regularly visited the country in order to report and write her book. Since December she has been based in Kabul, where she is guest blogger at the renowned think tank, The Afghanistan Analyst Network.

What impact is the suicide bombing of the hotel likely to have on President Hamid Karzai’s government?

Karzai’s government? There is no such thing as ‘one government’ any more, like we have in the West. Nowadays you have Karzai and loyalists, but you have other groups as well, like the one of the vice-president who is connected to the Northern Alliance, who are waging their own power struggle.

What will the impact be on president Hamid Karzai? I don’t know. I can imagine that Karzai fears for his life with all these rivals around him. Even more since the foreign troops want to withdraw and will not support him and his people any more.

How long he will last is  a good question. Taking the current situation into account, Afghans say that Hamid Karzai is the first person to flee when the troops withdraw. FULL POST