Via Matt Yglesias: Mitt Romney wants to clean up the metaphorically polluted allegorical ocean that is the cultural cesspool in which our real kids are symbolically swimming. To indicate this, he’s made a campaign ad, the second half of which contains shaky footage apparently shot by a creepy guy watching your kids from the edge of the beach you took them to:

Also, the sand represents premarital sex.

Presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s Utah finance co-chair, Robert Lichfield, is being sued by over 100 victims. Lichfield, it turns out, made his money by running camps where they lock up and torture people. Not convicted criminals. Not even accused terrorists. The people he tortures are children and teenagers.

Some fretful parents are mislead into hiring Lichfield, thinking his “treatment centers” will help their children avoid making mistakes. Other customers are repugnant parents who want to abuse their children and aren’t even man enough to do it themselves. Lichfield’s thugs lock up these youth and, as described in the law suit, subject them to battery, sleep deprivation, starvation, sexual abuse, and forms of cruelty that don’t even have names, all with the promise to parents that this will make their children more obedient.

Similar “behavior modification camps” have been run by Mel Sembler, Romney’s <I>national</I> finance co-chair. Sembler’s Straight Inc. paid out millions in lawsuits before it finally closed. (Actually, it still exists, but under a new name to escape responsibility for what it did under its old name.) Sembler survived with enough cash that, in addition to helping Romney, his other philanthropic work includes heading the Scooter Libby Defense Fund.