How can one answer without knowing the secret? If the secret really was that the sister had a life-threatening disease and only wanted to reveal this in person, yes, I think it would have been better to keep the secret. If the secret was "I've been embezzaling from mom's retirement plan for years, and I'm not sorry, and when I see the old hag I'm going to throw it in her face in front of everyone and laugh," then sure, don't worry about not having kept the secret.

But the bottom line is: things happen. People have to decide where their loyalty lies, and it's not always with the person holding the secret. And sometimes you give away secrets before you know you have, or the pressure of keeping it proves too much. Secrets get revealed more often than not. It seems to me it's very rare for me to share a secret with anyone, because a secret shared is so often a secret revealed.

I think Cary is partially right: this is something that can be healed over time. Depending, of course, on the secret.

That's his fantasy. Sure.

Ditzy? Sure. But seemingly kind and harmless. Why kick her when she's down?

How can you trust someone who maligns the philosophy of a book series (apparently unread), but then turns around and lionizes the woman for supposedly writing them? Shouldn't her participation in creating the so-called Reagan ideology actually compromise her integrity? No. Because she screwed around and alienated everyone and was almost sued by a celebrity. That's too admirable for anything—least of all her only single influention work (if she is in fact responsible for it)—to bring her down.

Geez, how is that value system less odious than the one Harding criticizes? What value system makes sleeping with lots of people and wishing death on FDR somehow more respectable, or even just more interesting, than surviving in harsh terrain, raising a strong-willed daughter, and leaving a literary legacy (either in whole or simply through supplying one's memories)? And boy I love Exquisite Koi for pointing out the offensiveness of pitting mother against daughter is a contest for who's "interesting."

This is without getting in the half-assed non scholarship that utilizes memories of a television series and the idea that "someone I don't like liked it, so it must be inherantly bad." Guess if Reagan admired Citizen Kane then it must automatically suck, huh?

It's admirable of the many letter writers here to actually provide factual information about the books and the writing process behind them. But I somewhat wish they hadn't, because it amounts to doing Harding's work for her and then allowing her to take the credit. For "starting the dialogue."

This piece was complete crap.

By the way, I believe Harding never reads the letters section, so the possibility of a retraction is unlikely. But then someone who writes this kind of article is not the kind to take responsibility for her actions.

Continually interrupting her efforts to explain how both the location of Obama's birth and how a record of his birth could have been inaccurate, and in constantly trying to sidetrack her with irrelevent questions (as much a loon as Taitz is, her question "What does Ann Coulter matter?" is, in this instance, appropriate).

Is she a loon? Probably. Is she a scam artist? Perhaps. Is Obama a natural US citizen? Certainly.

But I expected her to come off bad. I didn't expect MSNBC to come off worse. Yet they did.

If they were going to interview her, they should have asked her serious questions, given her time to answer, and let her flounder. Mocking her and interrupting her and trying to heighten her hysteria (and then trying to quiet her down, as if they were behaving "responsibly") is not the way to clear this up.

This interview might actually do more good than harm to her cause. Thanks for nothing, MSNBC.

I wasn't saying it to the parents. I was saying it in response to info on the movie, which didn't explain how you could make a human being's life bearable if they had such an overwhelming, continuous death wish. I guess I was putting the child's emotional needs above the parents. Is it all about the parents' lives, not the kid's?

And, as I said, if the documentary explains what sort of medication can ease this intense depression and help the kid to find value in life, great. I'm no supporter of suicide or euthanasia. I'm not being callous about this. But the review says nothing about alternatives. Just that from roughly the age when the ability to communicate developed to the age of 15, all the kid wanted to do was die. What sort of hellish life is that for the kid to live? How does anyone live with that? How can you not feel to some extent that at least the kid finally found peace, sadly the only peace he could find?

I wish the review had explained a little more what we know about what makes a young person feel this way, and what the documentary highlights as possible solutions, if there are any?

Great posts, both of them.

No matter how fucked up the fetus is, no matter how poor or alone the mother is. It's never the better choice.

And I still defend a woman's right to choose and still believe abortion should be a safe, easy-to-obtain procedure (even for those underage) because 1) what I think is irrelevent to her freedom of choice and 2) taking away the legal right is only going to endager two lives instead of one.