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Like a father suddenly freed from the obligations of grudging parenthood by a negative paternity test, New Viacom CEO Tom Freston continues to withdraw the last vestiges of his love from his former CBS children. An operative on the Paramount lot relates the latest slight to the Untouchables of CBS:

I just hit the studio store here on the Paramount lot to make a purchase and as I was checking out the girl behind the counter asked, "Are you Paramount or CBS?". After assuring her that I was in fact Paramount, or "clean" as we now call ourselves, she informed me that this was "good" because "CBS employees have had their employee discounts on DVDs rescinded." Yet another in the seemingly endless parade of fresh and creative humiliations those ghastly CBS lepers....errr, I mean, "employees" will have to endure each and every day. Twist that knife, baby.

By way of review, since the official corporate split, the poor CBSers have seen the abrupt yanking away of free movie screenings, the sudden inflation of their gym membership fees, and now, the in-your-face rollbacks of DVD discounts, which were instituted by Paramount head Brad Grey to purchase the affections of his new underlings when he took his job atop the studio. We are inclined to wonder what new cruelties can be visited upon the lot's second-class citizens: Formal Fridays? Morning hose-downs? The forced wearing of noisy, unfashionable cow bells, perhaps paired with rubber Les Moonves masks, each time a CBS Corp. worker displays the temerity to leave his or her cubicle? We can do nothing but watch in horror at these deaths by a thousand paper cuts, made all the more grisly by the realization that the CBSers probably had to purchase the paper used to inflict this series of incremental, ultimately fatal wounds from the lot stockroom at grossly inflated prices.