JESSE WALKER: Stop Demonizing Preppers: They’re More Diverse And Interesting Than Media Stereotypes Admit.

In fact, the prepper community includes a lot of political and cultural variety. If there is right-wing survivalist DNA here, there is also the DNA of the Whole Earth Catalog and several generations of bohemian back-to-the-landers, plus a fair number of families whose inspiration isn’t much larger than the Boy Scout motto, “Be Prepared.” Tour the online prepper communities, and you may well run into people who have embraced the long-lived conspiracy yarn in which the Federal Emergency Management Agency is plotting to put us in concentration camps. You may also encounter FEMA itself, which currently has an advertisement on the front page of the American Preppers Network. The ad asks, “Do you meet President Obama’s minimum Prepper Standards? Are you ‘FEMA Ready’?” Talk about all-encompassing diversity.

I think it’s funny that if you do what the government recommends — have several weeks of emergency supplies on hand — you’re a crazy anti-government extremist.

STEPHEN L. CARTER: The Other Crisis Facing The Federal Judiciary. “Had Congress kept its promise of $125,000 in constant 1989 dollars, I would still be on the bench.”

Plus: “Some context: $125,000 in 1989 dollars would be about $228,000 in 2012 dollars. A federal district judge currently receives an annual salary of $174,000. To most Americans, that probably sounds like a lot of money. But there are literally hundreds of executive-branch employees who earn more. So do first-year associates at many large law firms.”

GOVERNANCE: Court orders NLRB to justify continuing operation in wake of recess appointee ruling.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia today ordered the National Labor Relations Board to respond to a petition by a pro-business group that it suspend any further action in a Rhode Island case. The same court had earlier ruled that two of the three current board members were appointed unconstitutionally. Should the court grant the petition, it could force the NLRB to cease all activity.

“We are not asking the court to shut down the Board, but it may have that effect. If the court shuts down the NLRB in this case, why not another other case? This will open the door for challenges in the other cases that have the potential to be invalidated by the court’s decision last month,” said Anthony Riedel, spokesman for the National Right To Work Legal Defense Foundation, which filed the petition.

Read the whole thing.

IS THERE A CHINESE YAMAMOTO SOMEWHERE? Chinese Admiral Expects “Quick” Win in Japan War.

UPDATE: Reader Edward Dutcher writes: “Actually, anyone projecting an easy fight with Japan would be more of a Chinese Tojo.” Yeah, I was referring to Yamamoto’s warning that they couldn’t win a long war. There are, apparently, plenty of Tojos. Somebody should pay close attention to whether older, more conservative members of the officer corps start suddenly retiring or suffering accidents.

ON METEOR STRIKES, and nuclear weapons as units of measurement. “What I don’t like is … the idea that kiloton or a megaton is just an energy unit, that it’s equivalent to so many joules or something. Because you could do that. You could claim that your house runs so many tons of TNT worth of electricity per year, but it sort of trivializes the notion.”

AT AMAZON, it’s the Swim Shop. Summer is coming.

Plus, markdowns in the Clothing Store.

REPORT: Colorado Governor Isn’t Sold on Magazine Capacity Limit After Huge Public Fallout.

According to coloradopeakpolitics.com, the governor of Colorado, John Hickenlooper is wavering on a proposed magazine capacity limit that is making its way through the Colorado state legislature.

Since magazine giant Magpul, which is currently operating in CO, has announced they will pack up their operations, move across state lines and take hundreds (possibly thousands) of jobs with them and since there has been a huge national fallout over comments made by Democratic lawmaker Joe Salazar regarding women with guns and rape (see video below), the governor is apparently considering not supporting new gun control bills.

If I were in Colorado, I’d be trying to encourage him to come out in favor of civil rights, not gun control.

THE COUNTRY’S IN THE VERY BEST OF HANDS: J.D. Tuccille: FBI Sexting and Stealing a Great Reason To Not Give The Bureau More Power.

P. J. O’Rourke famously quipped that “giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys.” If he were writing today, though, he might have compared the state’s self-restraint to that of FBI agents handed smart phones and surveillance equipment. As reported by Reason 24/7, an internal disciplinary report from last fall shows that our fearless G-men (and women) have been busy sending each other pictures of their junk and using their surveillance skills to bug their supervisors’ offices. So you can definitely trust them with all of that extra spying power they’ve been gathering.

Good grief.

FORBES: The Non-Existent Spending Cuts Wrought By The ‘Devastating’ Sequester.

I WONDER IF HE’LL HEAR FROM HIS DISTRICT ON THIS? Goodlatte Says House Will Act on Gun Legislation.

Goodlatte, in one of his first interviews about gun violence since taking over the chairmanship of the Judiciary Committee in January, said the administration’s recent enforcement of gun laws has been “pathetic.” He noted that the Justice Department rarely prosecutes those who attempt to buy firearms illegally by lying on federal forms that ask prospective buyers to assert that they are not among a group of prohibited purchasers. He pointed to statistics, cited in the Judiciary Republicans’ letter to Obama, that the Justice Department prosecuted just 62 of more than 76,000 such cases in 2010.

But Goodlatte also said that the committee’s emphasis on stronger enforcement of current gun laws should not be interpreted to mean that it is not willing to take up new legislation. Until Friday, House Republican leaders had said only that their chamber is willing to look at whatever gun-related legislation is passed by the Democratic-led Senate.

I guess we’ll see.

UPDATE: Moe Lane comments.

POLITICS IN THE ERA OF HOPE AND CHANGE: Rand Paul: White House should pledge no drone strikes on American soil.

The Kentucky senator said he had sent a letter to John Brennan, Obama’s nominee to head the CIA, but had not yet received a response.

“I’ve asked serious questions, serious constitutional questions,” Paul said. “I’ve gotten zero response. And that is sort of the way this administration is treating Congress. The Senate has the right to advise and consent and approve nominees. I’ve not got one word of response from the administration on this.”

Paul has pledged to attempt to delay Brennan’s nomination until the White House responds to his inquiry.

“It’s inexcusable that the administration will not answer ‘absolutely no, we will not do this,’ ” Paul said.

Earlier this month, NBC News obtained a Department of Justice white paper outlining the specific circumstances under which the United States can conduct a lethal drone strike against an American citizen abroad.

Read the whole thing.

THE COUNTRY’S IN THE VERY BEST OF HANDS: FBI probe of defense tech allegedly leaked from NASA stonewalled, sources say. “The claims originate with several past and current NASA employees concerned with the systemic leak of highly sensitive information relating to missile defense systems, as well as what they call a troubled investigation into the leak. . . . The accusations stem from a reported violation of the International Traffic in Arms Regulation (ITAR), which governs the export of defense weaponry. In 2006, Ames adapted specialized rocket engines — originally developed for the Pentagon missile defense “Kinetic Kill Vehicle” program — for a moon lander prototype that ultimately became NASA’s Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer (LADEE). The robotic moon orbiter is set to launch on Aug. 12, 2013. Information on guidance and terrain-mapping systems from the Tomahawk cruise missile and a radar from the F-35 were also shared, according to one report in Aviation Week.”

UPDATE: A reader who asks anonymity emails: “I hear a different story about the ‘leak’ at Ames. My sources suggest this is a fairly transparent attempt by Bolden (NASA Administrator) to oust Pete Worden.” He’s a guy I trust, so factor this in.

RULES ARE FOR THE LITTLE PEOPLE. AND YOU’RE ONE OF THE LITTLE PEOPLE! Top Cuomo Aide Delivers Public Rebuke of State Worker Who Talked to the Press.

MY COLUMN IN TOMORROW’S WALL STREET JOURNAL: The Hollywood Tax Story They Won’t Tell at the Oscars: It’s easy to demand higher levies on the ‘rich’ when your own industry gets $1.5 billion in government handouts.

BOB WOODWARD: How Obama Has Moved The Goal Posts On The Sequester Deal.

“There was an insistence on the part of Republicans in Congress for there to be some automatic trigger,” Lew said while campaigning in Florida. It “was very much rooted in the Republican congressional insistence that there be an automatic measure.”

The president and Lew had this wrong. My extensive reporting for my book “The Price of Politics” shows that the automatic spending cuts were initiated by the White House and were the brainchild of Lew and White House congressional relations chief Rob Nabors — probably the foremost experts on budget issues in the senior ranks of the federal government.

Obama personally approved of the plan for Lew and Nabors to propose the sequester to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.). They did so at 2:30 p.m. July 27, 2011, according to interviews with two senior White House aides who were directly involved.

Nabors has told others that they checked with the president before going to see Reid. A mandatory sequester was the only action-forcing mechanism they could devise. Nabors has said, “We didn’t actually think it would be that hard to convince them” — Reid and the Republicans — to adopt the sequester. “It really was the only thing we had. There was not a lot of other options left on the table.” . . .

But then Burr asked about the president’s statement during the presidential debate, that the Republicans originated it. Lew, being a good lawyer and a loyal presidential adviser, then shifted to denial mode: “Senator, the demand for an enforcement mechanism was not something that the administration was pushing at that moment.”

That statement was not accurate.

Read the whole thing. Including this: “So when the president asks that a substitute for the sequester include not just spending cuts but also new revenue, he is moving the goal posts. His call for a balanced approach is reasonable, and he makes a strong case that those in the top income brackets could and should pay more. But that was not the deal he made.”

MEGAN MCARDLE: From the outside, a humanities PhD does not seem likely to ever be a career-enhancing move, for the simple reason that a PhD is a lengthy apprenticeship designed to teach you the skills needed to do exactly one thing: be a professor.

CHRISTINE PETERSON ON pushing the future in a better direction.

AT AMAZON, Up to 50% off on TV & Video.

Plus, up to 50% off on small kitchen appliances.

WHY WASN’T THERE A CHINESE SPRING? Although sharing many of the same problems as Arab societies, the Arab Spring never arrived in Beijing. Why?

CHANGE: Google Debuts Pixel, a Premium Touchscreen Chromebook. “The Pixel, a new Chromebook built and designed by Google that has been the source of web rumors for weeks, is real. And, as also has been rumored, it’s a Chromebook unlike any other — premium hardware, high performance and a high-resolution touchscreen display.”

NEWS YOU CAN USE: How To Get A Freelance Job in 5 Days.

THE NEXT HIPSTER EXERCISE FAD? Swedish walking with bouncy BungyPump poles. I think I’ll stick with Mark Rippetoe.

AT AMAZON, up to 75% off on Men’s Clothing.

FASTER, PLEASE: Available soon — a tricorder, a la ‘Star Trek.’ “The famed X Prize Foundation, which pays huge cash prizes to intrepid inventors, is offering prize purses totaling $12.5 million for the creation of a first-generation tricorder that could be used for medical diagnoses. Nokia and Qualcomm are putting up the money for the contests.”