[W]hat I do want is a judge who is sympathetic enough to those who are on the outside, those who are vulnerable, those who are powerless, those who can’t have access to political power and as a consequence can’t protect themselves from being being dealt with sometimes unfairly, that the courts become a refuge for justice. That’s been its historic role. That was its role in Brown v Board of Education.

Except for unborn babies, of course.

Those, you can kill with impunity (even after they’re born).

Sudan’s army has stepped up security in Khartoum, saying it has intelligence that a heavily armed convoy of Darfur rebels has advanced to the neighboring Kordofan province and is planning an attack.

But the rebel Justice and Equality Movement denied any move on Sudan’s capital and accused the government of trying to distract attention from recent bombing raids on Darfur that have brought international condemnation.

Heavy security operations began late on Thursday in Khartoum. Bridges were closed and checkpoints set up in the streets, forcing many people to stay at home.

“There were some forces from the Justice and Equality Movement who crossed from Chad through Darfur to Kordofan where they were aiming to cause destruction in Khartoum,” an army spokesman said. “The army is on a heightened state of alert.”

Meanwhile, AFP reports that Janjaweed militias continue to force people out of their villages in Chad while there are other reports that the International Criminal Court has not ruled out charging those behind the violence in Darfur with genocide.

In the DRC, the UN reports that militias continue to recruit and use child soldiers while the ENOUGH Project issued a report saying that the time for peace talks with Joseph Kony and the LRA are over and that states in the region must begin to treat Kony as a regional threat.

There is a tendency in our age to accede to the spurious excuse of moral relativism and turn away from the harshest examples of man’s inhumanity to man; to ignore the darker side of human nature that encroaches upon our decency by subtle degree. There are many reasons for this. Blessed with opportunity, and intent on the challenges of work and family, our own lives often seem too full and hectic to take notice of offenses that seem distant from our own reality. There is also the threat in a society passionate about its liberty that we can become desensitized to the dehumanizing effect of the obscenity and hostility that pervades much of popular culture. It is in our nature as Americans to see the good in things; to face even serious adversity with hope and optimism. And yet, with so much good in the world, for all the progress of humanity, in which our nation has played such an admirable and important role, evil still exists in the world. It preys upon human dignity, assaults the innocence of children, debases our self-respect and the respect we are morally obliged to pay each other, and assails the great, animating truths we believe to be self-evident — that all people have a right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness — by subjecting countless human beings to abuse, persecution and even slavery.

Confronting evil has never been easy — in our age or any other. But the failure to do so affects even those who are complacent with our own blessings and secure in our human rights. Accepting the degradation of values we believe are universal is to relinquish some of our own humanity. America was founded on the belief in the inherent dignity of all human life and that this dignity can only be preserved through shared respect and shared responsibility. We can retain our own freedom when others are robbed of theirs, but not the sense of virtue that made our revolution a moral as well as political crusade, and which recognizes that personal happiness is so much more than pleasure, and requires us to serve causes greater than self-interest.

That is beautiful and powerful prose, my firends. I am very impressed with both Senator McCain and his speechwriters. Well done, gents. 

h/t TechRepublican

(In case you missed it, it’s a parody of this)