A Middle East policy adviser for Barack Obama has left the campaign after acknowledging having held talks with Hamas, FOX News confirms.

The Times newspaper in London first reported Friday that the campaign was severing ties with the adviser, Robert Malley.

Malley said he had been in contact with the Palestinian group, but only through his work for a “conflict resolution think tank,” and not on behalf of the Obama campaign, the newspaper reported.

(Obama)’s as far from Bobby Kennedy as he is from Chester A. Arthur. It is impossible to imagine Obama, forty years after it happened, wading into the Indianapolis ghetto, unannounced and unprepared, to tell a crowd that Martin Luther King had been shot, and to drop Aeschylus on them into the bargain.

Jonathan Rauch writes: 

"John McCain hasn’t betrayed conservatism; his party has."

“Why should Fossella resign?  We in the private sector have standards. It is only in the public sector where greed, avarice, stupidity, corruption, lying, cheating and stealing are tolerated.” 

    - Craig Shirley, Republican strategist and President of Shirley & Banister Public affairs.  He is also the author of the forthcoming book “Rendezvous with Destiny.”

Many observers expected the collapse of the two-party system in 2008. Lou Dobbs of CNN wrote a bestseller called “Independents Day,” predicting an “independent populist” would win the presidency.  

There’s scant prospect of any viable third party, however, when potential fringe contenders have an air of “round-up-the-usual suspects”—Ralph Nader, Cynthia McKinney, Mike Gravel, Bob Barr, and Chuck Baldwin. Soaring turnout in primaries shows no mass desertion from the two-party system, and the Gallup Poll of under-30 voters notes a scant 8%—unchanged from four years ago—who consider themselves “independents.”  

The predicted “independents day” never materialized because likely nominees McCain and Obama, both of them once considered underdogs, give a fresh flavor to each party and show  the best way to work for change is within—not outside—the system that served us reasonably well for the last 150 years.