Israel’s operation in Gaza has moved into its seventh day, as the IDF moved its target from Hamas’ security infrastructure to its leadership, and it looks like it could continue for some time. Condoleezza Rice announced her desire for a “durable and sustainable” cease-fire, but said such a deal is contingent on Hamas’ cooperation. "We are working toward a cease-fire that would not allow a re-establishment of the status quo…where Hamas could launch rockets," she said. The Wall Street Journal also has word on what it calls a “new Israeli tactic”—the calling of some houses in Gaza in order to warn their inhabitants of imminent bombings, as well as the use of sound bombs to warn civilians away from targeted areas.

Now for an example of how filling a Senate seat should proceed: The Associated Press is reporting that Gov. Bill Ritter has chosen Denver Public Schools Superintendent Michael Bennet to replace Ken Salazar in the U.S. Senate. Salazar is vacating the seat in order to become secretary of the Interior. Bennet has headed Denver’s schools since 2005.

It's a good start to 2009 for the stock markets: The Dow Jones has closed over 9,000 for the first time since last November. The S&P was also up 3.2 percent and is up over 20 percent from the 11-year low it hit in November. Today marked the second best start of the the year ever points wise for the Dow. Trading volume was light, however, as many traders were away from their desks because of the holiday.

o those Ronald Burris supporters arguing that the Senate is constitutionally bound to accept him into their hallowed halls, Harvard constitutional law professor Laurence H. Tribe has a message for you: You’re wrong! It’s all laid out in the 1969 Supreme Court case Powell v. McCormack, he says. That case, centering on the House’s refusal to seat Adam Clayton Powell Jr., found that Article I, Section 5 of the Constitution deems "[e]ach House...the Judge of the Elections...and Qualifications of its own Members." So, when Barack Obama urges the Senate to exclude anyone appointed by Rod Blagojevich, including Burris, he’s got the constitution on his side. That’s never a bad thing.

After packing Sasha and Malia off to their new school on Monday morning, Obama plans to get straight to work. He meets first with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to help speed passage of the $1 trillion stimulus bill, which she would like ready for his signature as soon as he is inaugurated on January 20. Pelosi will be pressuring the new president to have his economic team provide details of the package so she can get legislation ready for a vote in the House as early as January 12. On Wednesday, House hearings begin on the stimulus plan. But the Washington Post predicts the passage of the recovery package won’t be easy. “Even if the House votes before Obama's inauguration, passage in the Senate is likely to be more contentious and take longer than in the other chamber. With an ongoing recount in Minnesota's Senate race and the process for replacing Obama in the chamber still uncertain, Democrats can be assured of holding only 57 seats during January, three votes shy of a veto-proof majority.”

The news that Governor David Paterson’s aides were encouraging him to duck the Caroline Kennedy controversy and opt for a stop gap senator to fill Hillary’s soon-to-be-empty Senate seat caused a flurry over the New Year. But the Princess of Camelot has shot back to the top of the likely list now that the governor has ruled out such a compromise. "I'm actually opposed to that," he told reporters at his New Year’s bash. "It would cause New York to lose seniority, and in the United States Senate, the most effective senators are the ones that have seniority. So, I'm hoping that the person I select wins a primary." Paterson’s New Year's resolution? "Not to talk about the Senate."

This is one way to keep Roland Burris out of the Senate: Should Roland Burris show up on Tuesday to assume Barack Obama’s Senate seat, Democratic leaders have instructed the Senate doorkeeper from barring him from the Senate floor. If Burris objects, then the U.S. Capitol Police will stop him and escort him from the premises. Burris told CNN that, "We're certainly going to make contacts with the leadership to let them know that the governor of Illinois has made a legal appointment. And that I am currently the junior senator for the State of Illinois. And we're hoping and praying that, you know, they will see the reason in appointing me as a very qualified, capable, able and ready-to-serve individual."

Obama’s promise to close the terrorist prison camp at Guantanamo Bay may take a long time to fulfill. The British government floated an idea to ease America’s embarrassment by taking some of the 60 inmates who cannot return to their own country for fear of torture or execution. But that generous idea has immediately run into trouble from Gordon Brown’s Conservative opponents, who see political capital to be made out of Obama’s discomfort. "The Foreign Secretary must explain urgently … how many Guantanamo inmates would be admitted to Britain, by what criteria they would be selected, and what assurances would be given about their behavior in the future," demanded top Tory William Hague. The British Foreign Office quickly backtracked, declaring that no deal had yet been struck on accepting non-British Gitmo prisoners.

John Travolta’s 16-year-old son Jett passed away today at his family’s vacation home in the Bahamas, TMZ has learned. Jett Travolta was with his father and mother, Kelly Preston, at the family’s home on Grand Bahama Island when he suffered a seizure. He died on the scene. Some have speculated that Jett is autistic but his father has long denied it, saying his son has Kawasaki Syndrome.

Two of President Bush’s most senior aides, who have been with him the entire eight years of his presidency, have sat down with The Washington Post in a last-minute effort to remedy their boss’s reputation. "One of the mythologies," said National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley (the other interviewee is Chief of Staff Joshua B. Bolten), "is that it was the vice president that somehow was pulling the strings on foreign policy in the first term and made it very ideologically driven and that somehow in the second term, the vice president's influence is in decline and, therefore, somehow the real Bush has come forward, and we have a more pragmatic foreign policy." Among Hadley’s other frustrations? "This is the one thing that just drives me crazy, that somehow this is an arrogant administration, an arrogant president running an arrogant policy. This guy—one thing he is not is arrogant."

The embarrassment of arriving at an inaugural ball only to find another woman wearing the same outfit can be avoided thanks to a new website. Dressregistry.com lets inaugural guests log their dress color, length, designer, neckline, and other characteristics so no two women arrive at a party in the same outfit. The site’s founder, Andrew Jones, got the idea after Laura Bush’s “Oh, no!” moment at the 2006 Kennedy Center Honors, when she was one of four women wearing the same red Oscar de la Renta gown. “If it could happen to the First Lady, it could happen to anyone,” Jones said. “With the inauguration, it just all came together in my mind. I thought it would be a great time to roll it out.” So far, inaugural partygoers have registered 100 gowns for more than two dozen events, including the Constitution Ball, the American Indian Inaugural Ball, and the Green Inaugural Ball hosted by Al Gore.

Basketball player Charles Barkley has a novel excuse for his New Year's Eve DUI arrest: sex. "I was gonna drive around the corner and get a b**w job," he told a cop in Arizona after he was pulled over for driving through a red light. "He told me that he ran the stop sign because he was in a hurry to pick up the girl I saw get in the passenger seat," the officer wrote. "He then explained that she had given him a 'b**w job' one week earlier and said it was the best one he had ever had in his life." Barkley was taken into custody, where he offered to get the name of a police employee tattooed on his butt.

Last year’s Batman movie, The Dark Knight, featuring Heath Ledger as The Joker in his final screen role before his drug induced death, has grossed $997 million at box offices worldwide, making it the world's best performing movie in 2008, according to movie industry research site Box Office Mojo. The movie’s runaway success gave Warner Bros an 18.5 percent share of the American film market in 2008, up from 14.7 percent last year. The studio took $1.75 billion, up from $1.41 billion in 2007. Paramount was in second place with US box office takings of $1.56 billion. It is thought Warner Bros was the best performing movie studio globally in 2008, although the worldwide figures are still being calculated. And The Dark Knight is likely to get a fresh boost when the Oscars are decided next month: Ledger is strongly tipped to win a posthumous Best Actor Award.

They are not exactly sore losers, but aware perhaps that their attendance at the Obama celebrations is not expected. Republicans are generally making themselves scarce from the inauguration parties on January 20. Charlie Spies, one of Mitt Romney’s top fundraisers, is hosting an “Inauguration in Exile” – in Las Vegas. The invitation reads: “What better way to mark the Obama Inauguration (and his millions of adoring fans that will be in DC) than to get out of town to fabulous Las Vegas!” Other GOPers are marking the end of the Bush era on the slopes, the islands, the NFL playoffs and even on honeymoon. Republican lobbyist Greg Crist will be crying into his beer. Or as he put it, “I will be pondering the future of my party at a remote location, aided in the conversation by my friend Jack Daniels.” As will Ryan Patmintra, press secretary to Senator Jon Kyl (R-AZ), who gets married in Tampa before honeymooning in Phuket, Thailand. “I'll be halfway across the world and hopefully sipping on a drink out of a coconut,” he said with glee.

George W. has left his Crawford ranch for the last time as president, having spent almost a sixth of his eight year term in the bleak countryside west of Waco—a full 490 of his 2,922 days in office, according to Mark Knoller of CBS News. The Boston Globe has been assessing the importance to Bush’s presidency of the Crawford ranch and his hours clearing brush. “It got created out of the crucible of a need for image-making,” explains Rice University historian Douglas Brinkley. “Don't have him as the Yalie cheerleader or the silver-spoon kid from a wealthy family. The image working around him became Crawford." University of Massachusetts at Boston historian Vincent Cannato agrees Crawford was important for defining Bush’s image as a regular guy. "It's not Washington. It's in the middle of nowhere. It's not trendy. It's not hip. There's no Starbucks there,” he explained. “It's more middle than Middle America." Although the president told reporters in 2001, “It'll be the house where I live in for the rest of my life,” he and Laura have bought a home in Dallas, Texas, where he takes up residence on January 20.

Has Israel's Gaza operation been successful? According to The Wall Street Journal, "Israeli attacks have destroyed wide swathes of administrative infrastructure but haven't appeared to degrade Hamas' ability to fire rockets into Israel—the reason Israel said it began its attack on Saturday." Israel is now in discussions with Washington over a cease-fire, which would include international monitors in Gaza to prevent Hamas from firing rockets into Israel. Such a move, writes the Journal, "could improve the security situation from Israel's perspective and give its leaders an exit and a way to claim victory as elections approach, without having to significantly escalate the conflict with a messy ground invasion."

With Roland Burris heading for the Senate to fill Obama’s empty seat, what stains can be found on his record? In 1992, then-State Attorney General Burris pushed for the execution of Rolando Cruz, who was twice convicted of the rape and murder of a 10-year-old girl seven years earlier, even though, by the time of his trial, someone else had confessed to the crime, reports Ben Protess at Propublica. Burris’s deputy attorney general, Mary Brigid Kenney, was so convinced Cruz was innocent she resigned rather than push the case forward. At the time, Burris was running for governor and Kenney thinks he didn’t want to look soft on crime. In her resignation letter, Kenney alleged Burris had "seen fit to ignore the evidence in this case." "I cannot sit idly by as this office continues to pursue the unjust prosecution of Rolando Cruz," she wrote. "I realized that I was being asked to help execute an innocent man."

A freeze on bonus payments for Citigroup’s top brass is not the only condition attached to the US government’s $45 billion bailout loan to the troubled bank. The fine print in the agreement, filed with the SEC on New Year’s Eve, reveals the Treasury will keep tight control of all staff expenses so long as the government holds a stake in Citi. The bank has agreed new rules for expenses governing use of the company's private jet, budgets for "entertainment and holiday parties," travel and accommodation, office renovations, the use of contractors, and the purchase or lease of real estate. If the bank wants to make changes to the policy, it must seek permission from the Treasury. But the filing also shows there are gaping loopholes to the ban on staff bonuses that will allow executives to pick up 60 percent of the 2008 bonus pool in stock, stock options, or  “deferred cash awards," with the remaining 40 percent "granted subject to performance-based vesting."

How goes governance in Afghanistan? In today's New York Times, Dexter Filkins files a report from Afghanistan, noting that “the state built on the ruins of the Taliban government seven years ago now often seems to exist for little more than the enrichment of those who run it.” Nearly everything can be bought—freedom from jail, trial verdicts, and positions in the police force. People in the highest levels of the Afghan government, including President Hamid Karzai’s brother, are cooperating in the opium trade. “This government has lost the capacity to govern because a shadow government has taken over,” said Afghanistan’s former foreign finance minister. According to a study this year by Transparency International, a German organization that monitors honesty in government, Afghanistan ranks 176 out of 180 countries.