Maria Cantwell

Thursday

Christopher Sandford

The Cuban ER doctor’s long-shot Senate bid in Washington State

Dr. Raul Garcia seems to follow a long Republican tradition in Washington State. He’s a fifty-three-year-old, Cuban-born ER physician who’s emerged from the primaries to challenge the four-term Democratic incumbent Maria Cantwell for her US Senate seat this fall. On the face of it, Garcia’s candidacy is just the latest in a line of plucky but ultimately doomed bids by a GOP outsider to unseat a tenured politician in this part of the world. A couple of years ago, a self-described farm girl from the Seattle suburbs with the striking name of Tiffany Smiley gave Washington’s other senator Patty Murray a run for her money, but in the end the incumbent scraped through for her sixth turn at the public trough.

raul garcia

Tuesday

Cockburn

Ex-TikTok employees sound the alarm over ties to China

Cocaine Mitch may be onto something. Last week, the senator called on his colleagues to pass a bill banning TikTok unless it is sold by its Chinese parent company, ByteDance. Now ex-TikTok employees are coming forward with stories detailing the company's entanglement with China.  According to eleven former employees interviewed by Fortune, TikTok has deep ties to Beijing through ByteDance which the company has tried to conceal. Some of the employees were with the company as late as last year, after the launch of Project Texas, a $1.5 billion initiative to store data of American citizens in the US. Evan Turner, a former senior data scientist at TikTok, worked for a Beijing executive during his time at the company.

tiktok
TikTok
Ben Domenech

The fight to curtail TikTok’s US influence

One hundred and twenty minutes. That’s how much time more than 40 percent of American children spent on TikTok every day last year. The app, owned by the Chinese company ByteDance, worms its way into the minds of young people to an extraordinary degree, dwarfing their use of Instagram, Facebook, Twitter/X and Snapchat. And when word went out that the House of Representatives was seriously considering forcing a sale to peel the app away from the power of the Chinese Communist Party, TikTok fired back by weaponizing the same children against Congress — driving a deluge of confused phone calls to Capitol Hill, including some where teens threatened to commit suicide if the vote went forward.

Tuesday

Cockburn

Mitch McConnell stands against TikTok

Mitch McConnel is tackling America’s biggest national security threat — TikTok. In a Senate speech Monday, McConnell implored his fellow senators to pass the bill requiring the Chinese company ByteDance to sell TikTok or face the app being banned from app stores within the United States. Passed by the House on March 13, the bill — officially known as the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act — has stalled in the Senate.  “America’s greatest strategic rival is threatening our security right here on US soil... in tens of millions of American homes.,” McConnell declared from the Senate floor. “I’m speaking, of course, about TikTok.

mitch mcconnell