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MY USA TODAY COLUMN: Ridiculous licensing rules are holding back people who want to work.

LIZ SHELD’S MORNING BRIEF: SHUT DOWN City, ‘Missing’ FBI Records and Much, Much More.. “Are the same morons who built the Obamacare website responsible for IT at the FBI?”

It’s a fair question.

JOHN RUBERRY: Trump Year 1: Yes, He’s A Conservative.

FAUXCAHONTAS: Elizabeth Warren’s Native American problem goes beyond politics.

There’s also discomfort on the left and among some tribal leaders and activists that Warren has a political blind spot when it comes to the murkiness surrounding her story of her heritage, which blew up as an issue in her victorious 2012 Massachusetts Senate race. In recent months, Daily Show host Trevor Noah mocked her for claiming Native American ancestry and the liberal website ThinkProgress published a scathing criticism of her by a Cherokee activist who said she should apologize.

As Warren is mentioned as a serious presidential contender in 2020, even some who should be her natural allies say Warren has displayed a stubborn unwillingness to address the gap between the story she was told of Native Americans in the family tree and a dearth of hard evidence to back it up.

It’s a disconnect that has lingered unresolved in the public sphere for more than five years.

Coming from the Boston Globe, that’s one helluva tacit admission that Warren’s been lying.

I’M A PRETTY GOOD SHOT FOR A LAW PROFESSOR. BUT THIS IS THE BIGGEST OF THE BIG LEAGUES: The World’s Longest Sniper Kill: The Enemy Shot Dead at 3,871 Yards (Over 2 Miles Away).

IT’S AMAZING HOW PEOPLE’S WORRIES ABOUT THE ECONOMY HAVE VANISHED: Trump Year 1 In A Single Chart.

CHANGE: Pentagon says confronting Iran now tops terrorism concerns.

The new National Defense Strategy envisions America’s military focusing on combating authoritarian ideals rather than the protracted global war on terror. The announcement comes as the Donald Trump administration has made clear in recent days that it plans to keep 2,000 US troops in Syria indefinitely to help usher in a political process to replace President Bashar al-Assad and confront Iranian influence in the country.

“To those who would threaten America’s experiment in democracy: If you challenge us, it will be your longest and worst day,” Mattis said in a speech at Johns Hopkins University. “We will continue to prosecute the campaign against terrorists, but great power competition — not terrorism — is now the primary focus of US national security.”

In broad terms, the blueprint lays out a three-pronged approach for America’s military to deal with the looming threat from Iran, which the administration has already framed as the primary competitor to US interests in the Middle East in Trump’s National Security Strategy released last month. Mattis said he aims to build a more lethal force, strengthen alliances and reform the Defense Department’s business practices to help the United States keep up with Russia and China as they continue to beef up their military might.

Turkey might be the real wild card in all this, as Ankara and Tehran share mutual interests in subduing the Kurds, humiliating the Arabs, weakening the Israelis.

SALENA ZITO: Groundhog Day In America:

“There is no limit to what we can achieve when we set free the dreams of our incredible people,” President Trump said to a crowd of supporters standing on a decidedly cold cement floor of an equipment company in suburban Pittsburgh.

He paused and told them they were incredible people, then peeled off a list of American achievements over the ages, from the early frontiersmen, to the workers who dug out the Panama Canal, to the building of the Empire State Building and the Hoover Dam, and the launching of a man onto the face of the moon.

“American hands and grit poured the concrete in our highways and forged the steel in our skyscrapers,” he said.

“Americans do anything, build anything, and create anything — as long as we have pride in our country, confidence in our values, and respect for our great American flag.”

It is unlikely that many outside of that room heard the words of what was without question the best speech he has given in his presidency; it was sharp, concise, to the point, and both filled with information on the benefits of his tax reform bill and aspirational for his supporters.

But for those who were there, it just reinforced the hope and confidence that his supporters derive from him, when he delivers to his highest potential.

One year after his inauguration, the voters who supported Trump have rarely changed their minds about how they see this unique figure in American politics. For a year and a day, most of the news they intake about him has been negative — sometimes, it is his fault; sometimes, it’s not; most of the time, it is a combination of both — delivered by a press that still struggles with trying to figure out how this disruptive, un-presidential, blunt, and sometimes uncouth man appeals to anyone.

As one gentleman at the rally, an engineer from suburban Pittsburgh and a Trump supporter, put it, “For me, it’s like Groundhog Day every day. I get up, read the news, he says something that no president has ever been caught saying out loud, the press explodes, and they spend the day talking about how awful he is and wonder how anyone could support him.”

“I go to bed, wake up, and it’s the same thing all over again,” he said.

“Don’t get me wrong, it’s not that I think the press is too hard on him. It’s that I don’t think they were as equally hard on the last guy, and I voted for both of them,” he said of both former President Barack Obama and Trump.

And yes, he thinks Trump is doing a great job.

The past year’s freakoutrage doesn’t seem to have weakened Trump as much as his opposition.

LINDSEY GRAHAM: Support ‘Amnesty’; Hispanic Community ‘Should be Our Voters.’

QUESTION ASKED: If Democrats think Trump is an authoritarian, why don’t they treat him like one?

What, and start wildly over-praising the president Kim Jong-un-style on magazine covers?

AXIOS: Venezuela’s economic collapse, by the numbers.

• Venezuelans are forced to contend with completely arbitrary daily withdrawal allowances. Pozzebano’s report details his attempt to get cash in the Venezuelan capital, ultimately getting 10,000 bolivars — that day’s allowance — after visiting four banks over four hours. That day, 10,000 bolivars equaled six U.S. cents.

•The country’s government assistance program gives citizens bags of essential goods at subsidized prices. Those goods have been shrinking in both size and quality as foreign investment in Venezuela collapses, but even they cost 30,000 bolivars each.

•Bloomberg notes that, according to its Cafe con Leche Index, the price of a cup of coffee in Caracas has risen from 5,500 bolivars to 45,000 bolivars in just 12 weeks. That pace, should it continue unabated, indicates an eye-watering annualized inflation rate of 448,025%.

More:

•Venezuela’s GDP contracted by 40% in per capita terms from 2013 to 2017 — and that’s based off estimates as Maduro stopped reporting economic data in 2015. A recent filing with the SEC by the Venezuelan government indicated that its economy had contracted by 16.5% in 2016 alone.

•To make things worse, the decline in Venezuela’s oil production and decreased global demand of Venezuela’s chief export — which greatly subsidizes its socialist regime — resulted in a 51% drop in national income from 2013 to 2017.

•The minimum wage declined by 88% from 2012 to 2017 when compared against the black market exchange rate.

•Venezuelans making that minimum wage cannot afford to feed a family of five, even when their entire income is devoted to purchasing the cheapest available calories.
Income poverty jumped to 82% in 2016 — a shocking increase from 48% in 2014.

Shocking — to whom? Certainly not to anyone who has been paying attention to Venezuela since it turned socialist.

RELATED: Corporate America’s nightmare in Venezuela is getting worse. “Venezuela has more crude oil than any other nation. But the crisis there is so bad that even oil companies are losing big money. The world’s largest oil service provider, Schlumberger, announced Friday that it wrote down $938 million of its holdings in Venezuela. It already took a $460 million loss last year because of unpaid bills from the Venezuelan government and its state-run oil company.”

JOURNALISM: CNN’s Maeve Reston: All We Talk About At CNN Is Russia And Voters Don’t Care About The Issue.

ALLIES: Turkish military enters Syrian province after days of airstrikes.

Turkish officials said the troops entered the Afrin area a day after Turkish jets pounded targets there in an attempt to drive US-allied Kurdish militia from the area. “Operation Olive Branch is ongoing as planned and the ground operation has started,” the Turkish armed forces said in a statement.

The land operation comes hours after Turkish jets targeted US-backed, Syrian-Kurdish YPG militia in the area, killing at least eight people and injuring 13, according to the Syrian Democratic Forces General Command.

The military incursion is likely to raise tensions between Turkey and the United States, which supports and openly arms Kurdish militias fighting ISIS.

Turkey said it launched what it dubbed Operation Olive Branch on Saturday to target “terrorist organizations” including YPG forces.

Operation Olive Branch?

THIS STINKS TO HIGH HEAVEN: FBI ‘Failed To Preserve’ Five Months Of Text Messages Between Anti-Trump FBI Agents.

The FBI “failed to preserve” five months worth of text messages exchanged between Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, the two FBI employees who made pro-Clinton and anti-Trump comments while working on the Clinton email and the Russia collusion investigations.

The disclosure was made Friday in a letter sent by the Justice Department to the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee (HSGAC).

“The Department wants to bring to your attention that the FBI’s technical system for retaining text messages sent and received on FBI mobile devices failed to preserve text messages for Mr. Strzok and Ms. Page,” Stephen Boyd, the assistant attorney general for legislative affairs at the Justice Department, wrote to Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson, the chairman of HSGAC. (RELATED: FBI Agents Discussed ‘Insurance Policy’ Against Trump Win)

He said that texts are missing for the period between Dec. 14, 2016 and May 17, 2017.

There have been so many episodes like this where crucial evidence is “lost” that I don’t believe any of it anymore.

Related: NSA erased surveillance data related to pending lawsuits: Report.

Surveillance data the National Security Agency vowed to preserve related to pending lawsuits has been erased, and the agency did not take several precautions it told a federal court it would take to ensure the data did not get deleted, court filings reveal.

Top NSA officials should be jailed for contempt. But they won’t because the law is for the little people.