People seem surprised by the recent news that “balloon boy,” aka six-year-old Falcon Heene, was simply the pawn in a ridiculous publicity stunt set forth by his clearly unstable parents with ambitions of reality-stardom (an oxymoron if there ever was one).

Now, while I’m shocked (ok, not really) that CNN covered the whole charade for the better part of an afternoon, including “CNN BREAKING NEWS UPDATES” which I mistakenly have programmed my phone to alert me of whenever they occur (my afternoon was filled with text messages like: “Balloon boy found in attic”…. seriously), and then continued to work the Heene family into their front-page coverage, including today’s, and yesterday’s, etc, etc., its hardly surprising at all to see a parent, in this case both, willing to take advantage of their children for financial gain and public attention.

Its not to hard to see where this is going:

http://evilbeetgossip.film.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/05/jon_kate_eight.jpg

Perhaps, collectively, we have to learn to take better care of our children.