In the days immediately following President-elect Donald Trump’s stunning victory on Election Day, he named two of his closest allies to White House posts: Republican National Committee chairman Reince Priebus as chief of staff and former Breitbart News executive Stephen Bannon as chief strategist. On Friday, Trump announced that he offered the attorney-general position to Alabama senator Jeff Sessions, CIA director to Kansas representative Mike Pompeo, and national security adviser to former Defense Intelligence Agency director Michael Flynn. In the coming weeks, Trump and his presidential transition team must appoint the entire presidential cabinet.

Here’s a comprehensive (and somewhat speculative) list of who is being considered for top spots in the Trump administration, drawn primarily from Politico and the New York Times.

On Wednesday, Senate Democrats elected New York senator Charles Schumer as minority leader to succeed outgoing Majority Leader Harry Reid. In an effort to counter the Republican wave of victories that caught Democrats by surprise on Election Day, Schumer’s leadership team includes senators representing different Democratic factions seen as crucial to the party’s future: Vermont senator Bernie Sanders and Wisconsin senator Tammy Baldwin from the progressive wing, and West Virginia senator Joe Manchin from the white-working class wing — that Donald Trump won over on November 8.

Sanders, the party’s chairman of outreach, and Baldwin, the party’s secretary, will provide progressive voices in leadership posts at a time when the Democratic party recently delivered the most progressive platform in its history.

And Manchin, despite being at odds with many in his party on an array of issues, will serve as the vice chairman of the Democratic Policy and Communications Committee.

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California’s liberals are infamous for railing against the top 1 percent and the income inequality that has supposedly plagued our economic system. Democratic governor Jerry Brown assured his colleagues in this year’s State of the State address that “California has not been passive” on the issue of income inequality. Just last week, voters passed Proposition 55, which extended — for twelve years — Brown’s tax increase on high-income earners, redistributing the wealth to help fund public schools and health insurance. But as California endlessly passes progressive laws that are intended to combat wealth inequality, public employees rake in lucrative salaries. In 2015, 220,000 public employees earned six-figure salaries, costing taxpayers $35 billion. Some of these employees earned salaries north of $400,000.

It’s not only public-sector executives who make these sizable salaries. Open the Books, a non-profit dedicated to disclosing government spending, found that 171 assistant city managers earned an average salary of $201,550 (in other words, some of California’s assistant city managers were in the top 6 percent of income earners nationwide). In the City of Riverside, not one, but two, assistant city managers made over $200,000. What’s more absurd is the income of their bosses: City managers in nine cities, including Escondido, Fremont, Napa, Ontario, and Palm Springs, made over $300,000, two of which (Escondido and Fremont city managers) cleared $400,000.

Other noteworthy high-income earners in the public sector were the “motor coach operators” and the “animal collection curators” who earned over $100,000, the lifeguard supervisors who made $250,000, the Los Angeles harbor-boat-pilots who made $483,000, and the city librarians who made $220,000. And the list goes on.

If four in ten California residents are living in or near poverty, and the progressive ideology is to redistribute the wealth as widely as possible, why are 220,000 public-sector employees earning these substantial government-funded salaries that place them in the top 25 percent of salary-earners nationally.

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New Jersey governor Chris Christie has had a bad week.

On Thursday, a top New Jersey legislator called for Christie’s impeachment, and today, vice president-elect Mike Pence replaced him as chair of president-elect Donald Trump’s transition team.

New Jersey senate majority leader Loretta Weinberg called on Vincent Prieto, the assembly speaker, to bring an impeachment vote to the floor because of Christie’s alleged involvement in “Bridgegate.” Weinberg claimed that Christie was aware of his office’s politically motivated decision to close lanes leading to the George Washington bridge. The latest six-week Bridgegate trial, which concluded with two of Christie’s two former aides being convicted, unveiled “considerable testimony”  implicating Christie, she said.

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Some Californians are unhappy about the coming Donald Trump presidency. Their solution? Revitalize a campaign to secede from the Union.

“Yes California,” a political action committee fighting for California’s independence from the union, is campaigning to qualify a secession initiative for the 2018 ballot, which in turn would force a special-election referendum on the question. The group had gained little traction since its founding in 2015, but received an outpouring of support for their movement in the aftermath of Trump’s victory.

Silicon Valley venture capitalist Shervin Pishevar vowed to fund California’s campaign “to become its own nation”; since then, others in the high-tech center have chimed in, including Anand Sharma, founder of the health-tracking system Gyroscope, and Dave Morin, founder of the social-media website Path. “It’s the most patriotic thing I can do,” Pishevar said. Yes, because patriotism means seceding from the country one supposedly loves.

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The political pundits, and the rest of America, are focused on last night’s stunning presidential results — but Donald Trump’s upset victory was only the crest of a wave that swept across the country, as Democrats watched their party all but wash away.

In the Senate, Republicans held on in almost all of their fiercely fought contests. Ron Johnson defeated challenger Russ Feingold in Wisconsin, despite having led in just one poll since February. In Indiana, Todd Young upset former governor Evan Bayh by ten points in a race Bayh was predicted to win by a large margin. In July, senators Harry Reid and Chuck Schumer urged Bayh to enter the race, and with a $9 million funding advantage from the start, he leapt to an early 20-point lead. A similar tale played out for Richard Burr in North Carolina, Roy Blunt in Missouri, Pat Toomey in Pennsylvania, and Marco Rubio in Florida. The result? Republicans now have a 51-seat majority (plus the likely Republican victory in Louisiana’s run-off, and Senator Kelly Ayotte still may win re-election in New Hampshire).

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In an election cycle that was anything but typical, social media — especially the two social-media giants, Facebook and Twitter — played an outsized role.

From tweeting about sex tapes at 3 a.m. to posting photos of a taco bowl to celebrate Cinco de Mayo, Donald Trump utilized social-media platforms to dominate the daily news cycle — and to circumvent a mainstream media he often found unfriendly. However, it may have been Hillary Clinton who used the tools most effectively.

Clinton’s account garnered more interactions — likes, comments, and shares — than Trump’s, and she penned the most re-tweeted tweet of the election.

Her “Delete your account” tweet, responding to Trump’s tweet about President Obama’s endorsing Clinton, earned over half a million re-tweets. She also earned 101,000 re-tweets after her campaign staffer was live-tweeting the presidential debate and sarcastically wrote, “‘I never said that.’ — Donald Trump, who said that,” with a link to Trump’s 2012 tweet on global warming being a Chinese hoax. Ironically, that 2012 tweet soon became Trump’s third most re-tweeted posts of the election, with 98,000 re-tweets.

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“Bridgegate” has yielded another round of convictions.* After a six-week trial and five days of jury deliberations, two of New Jersey governor Chris Christie’s former aides were found guilty this morning of offenses related to the politically motivated closing of lanes leading to the George Washington bridge. Bill Baroni, former deputy executive director of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, and Bridget Anne Kelly, Christie’s former deputy chief of staff, were convicted of fraud, conspiracy, and failing to uphold civil rights. Both aides face up to 20 years in prison.

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Last weekend, many Chicagoans spent Halloween weekend glued to their televisions, as the Cubs out-played the Cleveland Indians in game five of the World Series. But in the streets of the Windy City, things were more than just spooky. Outside, there were 18 murders, increasing the year’s count to 633. It was Chicago’s deadliest weekend of the year.

How egregious is Chicago? In the month of October there were 78 homicides. As the Washington Post reports, most major cities in the United States had not had 78 homicides in the first six months of this year.

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On Friday, Washington state attorney general Bob Ferguson filed a complaint against the Freedom Foundation, a local free-market advocacy group, for allegedly failing to disclose $2,000 in independent expenditures during its quest to defeat Ballot Initiative I-1501, known absurdly as the “Seniors and Vulnerable Individuals’ Safety and Financial Crimes Prevention Act.”

Certainly the undisclosed funds should be investigated; that, after all, is Ferguson’s job. But it is troubling that Ferguson is giving the Freedom Foundation expenditures such scrupulous attention while simultaneously acquiescing to the Service Employees International Union’s (SEIU) blatant misuse of the statewide initiative process. As I wrote on the homepage last week, I-1501 should not even be on the statewide ballot:

To look into the facts is to discover that I-1501’s intent has nothing to do with protecting citizens, and everything to do with altering the Public Records Act to prevent the Freedom Foundation, a conservative think tank, from obtaining the membership list of the SEIU – and, specifically, from obtaining the names of members who serve as home care providers and informing them of their constitutional right to opt out of paying union fees.

Given that Ferguson seems to be such a stickler for the rules, it is a little odd that he wouldn’t investigate SEIU’s role in this sham initiative.

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