CNN Radio News Day: December 19, 2012

You don’t have to be at this blog to listen, we want you to take us with you! Click the download button in the SoundCloud player and put us on your smart phone or tablet and bring us with you in the car, on the train or while you’re working out.

(CNN) – Welcome to CNN Radio News Day.

• Today President Obama took the first steps to deliver on a promise made to Newtown, Connecticut  and the nation last Sunday to use "whatever power" he has to prevent shootings like the massacre of 20 school children at Newtown's  Sandy Hook Elementary School.  He has asked Vice President Joe Biden to lead an administration effort to develop recommendations, no later than January, to prevent another tragedy like the school shooting, which also left six adults dead:

" This is not some Washington commission. This is not something where folks are going to be studying the issue for six months and publishing a report that gets read and then pushed aside.  This is a team that has a very specific task to pull together real reforms right now", the president said.

•  In the wake of the violent deaths of  those 20 elementary school children in Newtown, both conservatives and liberals agree that something needs to change.  But, the specifics of what should be done are not quite so clear. CNN's Lisa Desjardins takes us to the halls of Congress to hunt for exactly what lawmakers want to do now:

"There's no reason to have a magazine that holds 30 shells", says Vietnam veteran and hunter Congressman Mike Thompson, who's been tapped to head up the House's gun reform push.

• "Systemic failures within the State Department" are being blamed for the conditions that led to the deaths of U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans in the September 11th attack on the U.S. diplomatic mission in Benghazi, Libya. An independent review of the attacks released today also cites leadership and management deficiencies at the State Department. CNN's Libby Lewis reports:

"Our intelligence fell short.  Our security personnel were inexperienced and unprepared.  Our security systems failed", said Senator Dick Durbin  (D-IL) following this morning's closed-door briefing on the Benghazi report.

"Subscribe to this podcast on iTunes or Stitcher. And listen to News Day on our SoundCloud page.