Whenever a new governor is about to be sworn in, one of the most popular Springfield parlor games is figuring out who is on their way out and who is on their way in.

Of course, when a new governor is sworn in from a different party, the "who is out" part is relatively easy - pretty much everybody without civil-service job protection is out. Governor-elect Bruce Rauner is a Republican who just defeated Democratic Governor Pat Quinn, so almost all of Quinn's people are surely gone.

But who will Rauner bring in to run the government? I cannot tell you how many times I'm asked that question every day.

Much of the recent local speculation has focused on Republican state legislators, partly because most of the people closest to the outsider Rauner are unknown to the Springfield crowd. Legislators, on the other hand, are very well known. Some of those legislators are not-so-subtly floating their own names; some are just naturally assumed to be on a short list.

As a result, there are so many rumors going around about so many legislators being "sure thing" appointments that I long ago lost track of the count. It seems at times that the number could be half of the Republican caucus.

Bruce Rauner out-performed fellow Republican Bill Brady's 2010 gubernatorial-election performance in every region of the state last week. As I write this, with less than half a percent of the vote yet to be counted, Rauner has a 5-point margin over Governor Pat Quinn and appears to have won a majority vote in a three-way election.

The national headwinds against the Democratic Party surely played a role in the Quinn loss. But Rauner did better than other Republicans on the ticket. Comptroller Judy Baar Topinka is widely considered one of the most popular Republicans in Illinois, and yet she under-performed Rauner. At this writing, GOP state Representative Tom Cross and Democratic state Senator Michael Frerichs are just about tied in the treasurer's race. And Republican Supreme Court Justice Lloyd Karmeier appears to have narrowly survived an attempt to oust him.

Rauner scored just above the magic 20-percent number in Chicago, a point at which - with a significant advantage in the rest of the state - a Republican can win a statewide election.

But he didn't really need it. He out-performed Brady's 2010 campaign in suburban Cook County by 6 points, outdid the Downstater in his own region by a point, and dwarfed Brady's 2010 numbers throughout the collar counties.

Perhaps the worst thing to happen to journalism over the years is its simplistic over-reliance on the mere "appearance of impropriety" to justify big, splashy stories.

It's based on the assumption that everybody is corrupt. No actual wrongdoing need ever be found - just something that might look a bit fishy to a reporter's overly suspicious eyes. There's no need to prove anything; one or two distant connections is enough to justify destroying somebody's reputation - which didn't deserve protection anyway because everybody is evil.

And that brings us to Dave McKinney, who resigned last week as the Statehouse bureau chief for the Chicago Sun-Times. It was a reversal of what's become the norm: In this case, a politician caught a journalist in the appearance-of-impropriety web.

The most important question asked of Bruce Rauner during last week's gubernatorial debate in Peoria was posed by Jamey Dunn-Thomason of Illinois Issues magazine.

She pointed out that Republican Kansas Governor Sam Brownback had cut taxes across the board on the theory that it would boost the state's economy. His idea hasn't worked. What's happened instead is a huge revenue shortfall, which has forced gigantic state budget cuts and created an economy that now lags behind the rest of the country. So what did Rauner think of Brownback's policy, Dunn-Thomason asked.