Former network news star Katie Couric actually interviewed a Republican – Sen. Rand Paul – on her YouTube show, and the senator tried to take a moderate tone in contrast to Couric’s extremist DNC talking points. Couric cited a CBS News number. "Senator, if ICE agents were truly talking about the worst of the worst, as the president likes to say," she began. "Less than 14 percent of nearly 400,000 immigrants arrested by ICE in President Trump's first year back in the White House had charges or convictions for violent criminal offenses, according to an internal Department of Homeland Security document obtained by CBS News." Liberals can't do the math that even if you accept this claim, that's 56,000 violent criminals.  Many network reports (in addition to CBS) have tried to harp on the notion that Trump is somehow failing if violent criminals aren't 100 percent of the deported. Then they play games and don't count people charged with violent crimes, or convicted in other countries of violent crimes. Paul said "the facts make a difference." Jesse Watters pointed out how Katie Couric pushed Sen. Rand Paul on CBS's report that only 14 percent of 400,000 migrants arrested in Trump's first year back were violent criminals. Paul points out that matters if your family is victimized by someone who should have been removed. pic.twitter.com/isr6wfG38x — Tim Graham (@TimJGraham) February 14, 2026 COURIC: So isn't all this talk about ridding the country of violent criminals a massive overstatement, if less than 14 percent, again, of the 400,000 immigrants being arrested had charges or convictions for violent criminal offenses? SEN. RAND PAUL (R-Ky.): Well, I think the facts make a difference. And so that's one of the questions we will ask. And so when you come to Minneapolis, if they have a policy that says, oh, we're not going to turn over from our jails nonviolent prisoners, people who are, I don't know why you're in prison if you're nonviolent, but maybe you have a drug crime that's a nonviolent. COURIC: I think there are plenty of nonviolent people in prison. PAUL: But the thing is, that's not their policy. Their policy is we will turn no one over. So you can be, you beat somebody half to death, you get an assault charge, and you're in jail for a couple years, and somehow you're getting out on parole, and you're not going to be turned over and you're illegal…. I've got a problem with that, and so do probably most independents and Democrats. But that's what we have to ascertain. And the thing is, is that's not the policy of Mayor Frey. He did not come forward and say, we're not going to turn over nonviolent prisoners. He just simply said, we're not going to cooperate at all. Paul discussed his sense of the polls: "I think most people are in the middle. I think most people actually hate what the use of force that they saw with Alexander Pretti. But I think if you ask them, if a guy's committed rape and he's in prison, and he's going to get out, do you want him deported? I think people would say, hell yes, he ought to be deported." Couric couldn't accept this common-sense majority position -- perhaps in deference to her liberal fans -- so Paul kept bringing the common sense.  COURIC: Let me say that though, what about the 14%? Such a low percentage of 400,000 people. PAUL: If your daughter gets raped by the guy that gets back out and he's one of the 14%, I don't think you're going to quibble about whether it's 14 or 64. What I'm saying is, if you're not going to turn over anybody, then that's 0%. I don't think the percentage, it makes a halfway argument to how much effort we have. But if Minnesota is not going to turn over anybody, the whole argument, whether it's 14 or 86, doesn't mean anything. So if they're not turning over anybody, then inevitably there are, and there are many emotional cases. The Laken Riley case of a guy that had been arrested, should have been deported. He was a thug, he was arrested multiple times up in New York. The government paid to send this thug to look for a job in Atlanta. It was almost like, we'll give you a bus ticket so your crime committing person will send you to some other state. But to Laken Riley's family, it was a big deal, and it is a big deal to people who care about what happened to her, that if that person had been deported. Now you might tell me that person's an anomaly, he's only one in 100, but up in Laken Riley's family, I don't care if it's one in 100. The one in 100 people who are violent, if that's a number, or if it's 14 in 100, we want them deported.

MESSAGING:

Trump needs to be talking about Poop River non-stop. https://t.co/VgcRKEqiSl

— Cernovich (@Cernovich) February 15, 2026

New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani is barely a month into the job, and he's already aggressively seeking to follow through on his campaign pledge to crack down on the gig economy. In recent weeks, his administration has launched several high-profile initiatives against gig companies, seeking to portray them as greedy corporations out to fleece earnest workers.

But behind the flashy press releases and dramatic saber rattling, the reality is that New York City's own past policies are to blame for much of the gig economy drama in the Big Apple. And worse yet, it's every day New Yorkers who will likely suffer most from this regulatory onslaught.

From day one on the job, the Mamdani administration has made its anti-gig bent clear. On inauguration day, Mamdani's pick to head the city's Department of Consumer and Worker Protection (DCWP), Samuel Levine, was already signaling to the press the coming gig economy crackdown. Even prior to Mamdani's official inauguration, Levine's appointment to head DCWP was accompanied by language accusing gig companies of misclassifying workers as independent contractors instead of full-scale employees.

Before serving in the Mamdani administration, Levine worked at the Federal Trade Commission during the Biden administration, where he was known as a key acolyte to Lina Khan during her notorious anti-business reign at the agency. Now, Levine is running point for Mamdani's anti-gig agenda across New York City.

Two weeks into Mamdani's tenure, the mayor, joined by Levine and Deputy Mayor for Economic Justice Julie Su—another former Biden official, who served as the acting secretary of labor during the 46th president's term—issued a statement declaring a "New Era of Accountability" for gig companies.

The declaration coincided with a DCWP report alleging that gig companies like Uber and DoorDash had "engineered design tricks" in their in-app platforms to reduce worker tips by $550 million. These "design tricks" included moving in-app tipping prompts for food delivery, presenting the option for tipping after an order was complete, rather than before.

This in-app tip reshuffling came in reaction to NYC's prior 2023 decision to impose a minimum wage for food delivery drivers in the city, which sent food delivery costs soaring. The companies appear to have changed the timing of the tip option as a way to reduce the sticker shock for consumers when placing orders.

The New York City Council responded last year by passing a law mandating that gig companies place their tipping prompts before an order was placed, rather than after. Last month, after news arrived that several lawsuits by gig companies seeking to enjoin these (and other) gig-related rules were rejected by federal judges, Levine's DCWP issued a statement reiterating its plan to "vigorously enforce" the city's minimum wage and tipping rules for gig workers.

The city also launched its own lawsuit against the gig company Motoclick, which it argues "blatantly ignored" the minimum wage law and "stole directly from workers' paychecks." While it's impossible to evaluate the claims against Motoclick at this early juncture in the legal proceedings, Mamdani's team also recently announced a $5 million settlement with gig platforms UberEats, Fantuan, and Hungry Panda for violating the minimum wage law.

The UberEats settlement received the most attention since it involved the highest amount of settlement money. But while the top-line numbers received all the press, little attention has been paid to the fine print: Even the city noted that UberEats was "mostly compliant" with the minimum wage law and "incurred the wage debt only in weeks where workers had a delivery canceled" (and therefore the workers involved failed to receive the appropriate compensation from Uber).

Uber clarified that DCWP had originally flagged this pay shortfall to the company in August 2024, one and a half years before Mamdani took office, and Uber immediately agreed at the time to take corrective action to fix the issue and pledged "to pay more than the amount owed" in response.

This nuance didn't stop Levine from triumphantly declaring: "The era of giant corporations juicing profits by underpaying workers is over."

Also being lost in all the media fanfare over Mamdani's gig war is the likely cost to every day New Yorkers. Evidence has repeatedly shown that anti-gig regulations always end up resulting in higher costs for consumers. Just recently Instacart instituted a $5.99 regulatory response fee due to a recent extension of NYC's minimum wage law to grocery deliverers.

It's also unclear how much the regulatory onslaught even helps gig workers. Tips plummeted by nearly 50 percent in the wake of the minimum wage law's passage in NYC, and delivery drivers in Seattle, which implemented its own minimum wage for gig-based delivery, failed to see any sustained higher take-home pay from the city's minimum wage law.

These anti-gig policies have also resulted in more gig companies resorting to "arranged scheduling" models, in which the number of delivery drivers that can be active on the platform at any one time is restricted in order to control labor costs. This locks would-be drivers out of the market altogether and takes away a potential money-earning opportunity that these workers are depending on.

Mamdani's war on gig is getting a lot of press. But beyond the flashy headlines, it's clear that both workers and consumers are likely to suffer.

The post In Mamdani's War on Delivery Apps, New Yorkers Are the Collateral Damage appeared first on Reason.com.

Most hard core liberals, especially in the media, take it as a matter of absolute faith that President Donald Trump is the puppet of Russian president Vladimir Putin. However, an article published in a very surprising source has shattered that myth. The Atlantic magazine, yes that Democrat-loving periodical, published an article on Friday that destroyed that notion. And the two authors of the piece can't be written off as ill informed. Both Thomas Graham and Alan Cullison are members of the Council on Foreign Relations. In addition, Graham is the author of "Getting Russia Right" and Cullison was a former Moscow correspondent for The Wall Street Journal. Their article,"Putin Didn’t Know How Good He Had It," sweeps away the sacred liberal belief that Putin somehow controls Trump. In fact, they make a strong case that it was in large part due to Trump that Putin and Russia are currently in a very bad position on the world scene. For decades, Russian President Vladimir Putin railed against the world that the United States built after the Cold War. In his account, an international order run by a single power would hinder Russia and produce needless conflict, especially when that power was as self-serving and duplicitous as America. Now Donald Trump is dismantling the order that Putin had so long abhorred, and a new multipolar world is emerging in its place. Putin had thought he could rise to the top of such a system, in which raw economic and military might outweigh diplomacy and alliances. But he was mistaken: The norms and institutions of the postwar order actually masked Russia’s vulnerabilities. Putin has gotten the world he wished for—and it’s threatening to crush him. And if you are still clinging to the absurd notion that Putin somehow controls a compliant Trump then you (hello, Atlantic readers) have taken a fatal overdose of the thoroughly discredited Steele Dossier as Graham and Cullison continue to reveal the reality of the situation. Putin also assumed that a multipolar world would free him from American interference. And indeed, Trump has accommodated Moscow in some ways. His conciliation does not, however, extend to Russia’s energy sector, the foundation of its economy: Last fall, Trump levied wide-ranging sanctions against Rosneft and Lukoil, the country’s two largest oil producers. The U.S. has also ramped up enforcement against shadow tankers, threatening a primary channel that Russia has used to sidestep sanctions on its oil sales. Trump’s plans to revive Venezuela’s petroleum sector might likewise hurt Russia. Executing those plans may prove more complicated than Trump anticipates, but they could drive Russia’s oil prices below what its federal budget can sustain. Moscow is at the mercy of an American president who circumvents traditional channels of power and obliterates the constraints that once regulated their use. For example, Trump could attempt to use his recently constituted Board of Peace to bypass the United Nations Security Council—and Russia’s veto—and muscle through his preferred policy in the Middle East, eroding Moscow’s influence in the region. Thanks to decisions by both Trump and Putin, moreover, the two powers no longer have any functional arms-control agreements. Without these, Trump could choose to accelerate his “Golden Dome” missile-defense program, which Russia fears could undermine its own nuclear deterrence. Trump’s disdain for international alliances and norms has also begun to reshape Europe in a way that may exacerbate Russia’s weakness. As U.S. security assurances wane, European countries are developing their hard-power capabilities. Germany has committed 100 billion euros to modernize its military, and Poland is building up its armed forces with a goal of amassing 300,000 troops. Putin has long wanted to split the U.S. and Europe. But he might soon find that the continent—which collectively dwarfs Russia in population and wealth—poses a significant challenge even if it doesn’t belong to a U.S.-dominated alliance. This should dispel the idea that Trump is merely Putin's puppet. However, never underestimate the liberal aptitude for self-deception. The same poor souls fully expected the Mueller Report to prove Trump-Russia collusion, when that report revealed no vast conspiracy, were still unable to let go of their delusions. However, it is refreshing to see cold reality splashed directly on the faces of the Atlantic readers.

U.S. — Customers were helpfully alerted by an Amazon product's 4.2 star rating that it is obviously total crap.