In just weeks Robert Gibbs is going to become one of the most watched people in Washington DC as he is slated to become the White House press secretary. He's a young veteran of politics from Alabama and few people are closer to the president-elect. New York Times magazine writer, Mark Leibovich, has just written a profile of Gibbs that will run in this weekend's edition and he joins The Takeaway to tell us what we can expect with Gibbs as press secretary.

President-elect Barack Obama will announce his selection of Republican Illinois Congressman Ray LaHood as his transportation secretary today. While LaHood will be the second Republican in Obama's cabinet, he is known as a moderate willing to work across party lines. But he has a weak record on the environment and hasn't been a mass transit advocate. Tanya Koonce, News Director of WCBU in Peoria, gives The Takeaway a briefing on her hometown congressman.

An organic farmer and an environmental advocate discuss the pros and cons of Former Iowa Governor Tom Vilsack as head of the USDA.

In just over a month President-elect Barack Obama will take over the White House and right now an unprecedented transition is taking place. While there have been transitions before, this is the first in the post-9/11 federal government and the first changing of the guard at the Department of Homeland Security. Peter Baker from the New York Times has been covering the issue.

For more of Peter Baker's coverage, read his article "Obama Team Has Forged Another Link With Clintons," in today's edition of the New York Times.

Where was the Securities and Exchange Commission—the federal agency responsible for regulating Wall Street—when Bernard Madoff was allegedly pulling off a massive fraud that could leave investors with billions of dollars in losses? Experts say there were plenty of red flags that should have tipped off regulators that something was seriously amiss. Stephen Labaton, who covers regulatory issues for the New York Times, joins The Takeaway with the story.

Want more from Stephen Labaton? Read his article, "S.E.C. Image Suffers in a String of Setbacks," at the New York Times.

Today the president-elect is expected to name Arne Duncan, superintendent of the Chicago public school system, as secretary of education. Veronica Anderson, editor-in-chief of Catalyst Chicago, a magazine that reports on school reform, gives The Takeaway a full briefing on the new educator-in-chief.

An unpublished 513-page federal history of the American-led reconstruction of Iraq ("Official History Spotlights Iraq Rebuilding Blunders", the New York Times, Dec. 14, 2008) depicts an effort crippled before the invasion by Pentagon planners who were hostile to the idea of rebuilding a foreign country, and then molded into a $100 billion failure by bureaucratic turf wars, spiraling violence and ignorance of the basic elements of Iraqi society and infrastructure.

With a president, vice president and a secretary of state nominee all coming from the U.S. Senate, three state governors will have the chance to choose their replacements.

Can you sue the Attorney General?

Taking on an issue like gun regulation in the US can mean political suicide for even the savviest of politicians. Nate Persily, law professor and political scientist at Columbia, joins the Takeaway to talk about what President-elect Barack Obama needs to know about gun policy during his first term in office.

One of our listeners was particularly proud of the selection of Eric Holder as U.S. Attorney General:

"Obama is going to form a working coalition and put people in it that give him the votes when he needs them. If you think that you're going to have all Democrats, all highly partisan people, you may be disappointed."
--Lynn Sweet on the president-elect's cabinet choices