"Even worse than what Wall Street did."

That’s how Eliot describes the cover-up by the Japanese power company and government after the Fukushima nuclear disaster. This week the government revealed that the contamination is actually twice the level they’d previously announced.

Near the reactors, a rabbit was born without ears – a genetic mutation whose cause is unclear, but "serves as a reminder and a searing symbol of the accident," says CUNY Professor Michio Kaku, author of "Physics of the Future."

This is an exerpt from our show of June 10, 2011.

Author Naomi Wolf and Errol Louis, host of NY1's "Inside City Hall," examine the week's top political stories with Eliot.

In this excerpt from Friday, June 10, 2011, Louis says that if his constituents want Rep. Anythony Weiner to keep serving, why should any other opinions count.

Wolf agrees that what Rep. Weiner did was bad, but asks: is this the lie to end his career? FULL POST

BLOG EXCLUSIVE : Answering today’s OFF-SET questions is Ken Hughes, a researcher with the Miller Center’s Presidential Recording Program.

Hughes joined the University of Virginia program in 2000 after more than a decade covering the federal government as a journalist. His research on the White House tapes of Richard M. Nixon, Lyndon B. Johnson and John F. Kennedy has focused on the politics of the Vietnam War.

The federal government has now declassified the infamous Pentagon Papers. The Nixon Presidential Library & Museum will release the complete documents on June 13, 2011–forty years to the day that The New York Times published excerpts as a front-page story.

The papers were leaked by Daniel Ellsberg, a former Pentagon official, who, while working for the administration of Lyndon Johnson, had access to a top-secret document that revealed senior American leaders, including several presidents, knew that the Vietnam War was an unwinnable, tragic quagmire. Officially titled "United States-Viet Nam Relations, 1945-1967: A Study Prepared by the Department of Defense," – the Pentagon Papers, as they became known–also showed that the government had lied to Congress and the public about the progress of the war. In 1969, he photocopied the 7,000-page study and gave it to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. In, 1971, Ellsberg leaked all 7,000 pages to The Washington Post, and 18 other newspapers, including The New York Times, which began publishing them on June 13, 1971.

(CLICK HERE to read our OFF-SET interview with Daniel Ellsberg.)

In this interview, Hughes says: "Richard Nixon was gleeful and fearful when the Times started publishing the Pentagon Papers. Gleeful that the Top Secret Defense Department study detailed the failings of his two predecessors and political rivals, Democrats John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson, but fearful that the leak was the work of a conspiracy that would go on to leak Nixon's own politically damaging foreign policy secrets."

Hughes also says: "Why do we allow ourselves, as citizens of a republic, to be dependent on any whistleblower just so we can read the documents that we need to hold our government accountable for its actions? The link between Ellsberg and (WikiLeaks' Julian) Assange is that I should not have to depend on either of them or anyone else for information that I have the right to know." FULL POST

The Number of the Day is 1.2 percent.

The Federal Reserve on Thursday announced that the net worth of the average U.S. household rose 1.2 percent in the first quarter.

That means that an average family’s wealth—homes, stocks, bonds and the like, minus the debts they owe, such as mortgages—has actually increased, albeit slightly.

Before we get too excited, we should also remember that the stock market has been on a bit of a skid recently, so a lot of this increase has already disappeared.

But when people see their net worth rise, they become more confident about their future and become more willing to spend. So reports The Wall Street Journal.

Whether or not this increase in net worth – and hopefully the consumer spending that follows-will be enough to spark any uptick in the economy for most people is of course, a long shot.

And the millions of people who have been looking for a job for a year or more are unlikely to feel this moment of good economic news at all

 For most folks, the primary asset they own is their house, and will probably not be until the housing market turns around that people will feel comfortable about their economic circumstances. FULL POST

ONLY ON THE BLOG: Returning to answer a new set of OFF-SET questions is Akbar Ahmed, Professor at the School of International Service at American University in Washington, DC.

Ambassador Ahmed is currently the Ibn Khaldun Chair of Islamic Studies at American University. He was also the First Distinguished Chair of Middle East and Islamic Studies at the US Naval Academy in Annapolis, Md., and a Nonresident Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution. He has taught at Princeton, Harvard, and Cambridge Universities and has advised General David Petraeus, the late Amb. Richard Holbrooke, and many US agencies on Islam and foreign policy. (*Bio continues below)

 In the next few weeks, President Obama is expected to announce how many of the 100,000 American troops will be withdrawn from Afghanistan. Top military chiefs are warning that a precipitous change—too many, too quickly—may undo the gains made there. Meanwhile, The Washington Post reported that a two-year congressional investigation has concluded that U.S. nation-building has only had limited success and that the nation may not survive the withdrawal.

From your point of you, what are the implications of an announced troop withdrawal, no matter what the numbers are?

Obama’s announcement of "significant" troop withdrawals in the wake of  bin Laden’s death and on the eve of re-elections makes sense. The majority of Americans are now tired of America’s longest war being fought in Afghanistan. 

But Obama’s announcement would have also been heard with great interest in Afghanistan and the countries around it. Everyone there would be thinking of a post-America scenario for themselves.

Troop withdrawals are part of war strategy and military tactics. In that sense, by showing his hand, Obama has thrown his troops off-balance. Secretary Gates promptly talked of the need for continued engagement. Privately, he would be thinking of the logistics of withdrawal in a country that has a track record of leaving little trace of the occupying force—as the examples of the British in the nineteenth century and the Soviets in the twentieth century testify.

For purposes of the discussion, let me use the metaphor of the Great Game. FULL POST

ONLY ON THE BLOG Answering today’s six OFF-SET questions is Betsy Landers, of Memphis, Tenn., who will become the National PTA’s 52nd President when she is installed on Sunday, June 12, 2011.

As the largest volunteer child advocacy association in the nation, National PTA is composed of 54 state congresses and nearly 26,000 local units in all 50 states, the District of Columbia, U.S. Virgin Islands, and the Department of Defense Schools in Europe and the Pacific.

First of all, congratulations. I imagine one the biggest issues you're facing is that many states, fighting huge deficits, must balance their books and they're cutting funding for schools and letting go of teachers and support staff.  What can parents and teachers do in the face of harsh economic realities?

Thank you Jay! I'm honored to have this opportunity to make a real difference for our country's families and children. You're right, funding for schools is being cut everywhere and it has to stop.

Every year schools are asked to do more and more with less and less. Parents fundraise to fill funding gaps so that a school has everything it needs to help their children succeed, but to what end?

As much effort as parents place in fundraising, they should put double the effort into flooding their elected officials' offices with phone calls, letters and personal visits to say "enough is enough." We cannot balance the budget on the backs of families and children. FULL POST

WHAT YOU MIGHT BE READING THIS WEEKEND – More than 24,000 pages of e-mails relating to Sarah Palin's term as governor are scheduled to be released Friday by the state of Alaska to CNN and other news organizations. Among the material that will be made public are Palin's e-mails dealing with state business - using both her official account as well as private accounts, according to Linda Perez, the administrative director for current Gov. Sean Parnell.

GATES SAYS NATO NEEDS TO CHANGE –  Outgoing U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates says NATO has become a "two-tiered" alliance poorly equipped to deal with challenges, and with members either unable or unwilling to carry out agreed missions in Afghanistan and Libya. FULL POST