NOT THE SHARPEST KNIFE IN THE MSNBC DRAWER: Chris Matthews, who derides Palin as stupid, says Panama Canal is in… EGYPT! It is, of course, the kind of mistake anyone can make on the air. But it’s true — if Palin made it, it would be proof of stupidity. So, goose, meet gander.

MICHAEL TOTTEN ON EGYPT, from 2005. (Reminder from Michael Greenspan.)

I GUESS THAT MEANS I NEED TO COME OUT WITH MY OWN LINE OF SUITS: the Johnny Carson of the digital age?

AT AMAZON, DVD markdowns on movies & TV.

“LIFE SUCKS” FOR COLLEGE FRESHMEN, but Dr. Helen is unmoved. “Maybe if the rewards for being a grown-up were greater and the rewards for acting like a self-indulgent teen well into your 30’s were less, we would see fewer miserable college freshman.”

EGYPT: “This is not a nostalgic ‘anti-colonial uprising’ from within.”

COULDN’T HAPPEN TO A NICER GUY: Is Qaddafi Next?

PRAISE FOR WONKETTE: “Still though, that’s about 28 times more than a Village Voice-lanche, so they’ve got that going for them.”

CLIMATEGATE: British Met Office Keeping Two Sets of Books.

WHAT OBAMA DIDN’T MENTION, when he praised a school in the SOTU address.

DATECHGUY’S RADIO SHOW is on tonight at 9 p.m. Eastern. You can listen live here.

PROFESSOR BAINBRIDGE ON the beauty of the corporation. “We should be eternally grateful that slave owning, miscegenating, Jacobin-leaning Jefferson failed to squelch the corporation.”

Hey, don’t be dissing miscegenation. Otherwise, yeah.

BARRY RUBIN: Egypt: Three Possible Outcomes.

CLOSING DOWN THE COMPETITION: TSA shuts door on private airport screening program. “A program that allows airports to replace government screeners with private screeners is being brought to a standstill, just a month after the Transportation Security Administration said it was ‘neutral’ on the program. TSA chief John Pistole said Friday he has decided not to expand the program beyond the current 16 airports, saying he does not see any advantage to it.”

No advantage for him, as it was making TSA look bad. Er, I mean, worse.

ARE WE ALL NEOCONS NOW? “So having already endorsed the essentials of the Bush war on terror, Obama is now belatedly embracing the freedom agenda too. Does that mean we’re all neocons now?” Of course not. Obama’s implementation of Bush’s policies is completely different. I do wish that Bush had continued Bush’s policies after 2005, instead of dropping the ball.

COLD TRUTHS ABOUT electric cars’ cold-weather shortcomings.

NOT HOW I ENVISIONED THE 21ST CENTURY: Six Cases Of Cholera Suspected In Massachusetts.

CHRIS CHRISTIE TO ILLINOIS BUSINESSES: Come to New Jersey!

REVERSE ANGLE. Heh. Cheap, but they were asking for this. . . .

ANSWERING THE IMPORTANT QUESTIONS: Why ARE women’s breasts getting bigger?

UPDATE: Reader Arthur Lueck writes: “While I am not the most religious sort, I think the reason is clear: God loves us and wants us to be happy.”

“THE LAW PROFESSORS HAD A FAILURE OF IMAGINATION.”

And to politicians who dismiss the constitutional allocation of power as a “technicality,” be reminded that on tax day people pay taxes, instead of treating you like robbers, because of the constitutional allocation of powers. Without that, you’re just another bandit to be treated accordingly. Do you really want to dismiss the rule of law that way? The answer, of course, is that to politicians, the rule of law — like the taxes — is for the little people. I would recommend against pushing too hard on that front right now, though.

MORE EGYPT LIVEBLOGGING AT THE ATLANTIC. Note the formation of armed citizen patrols against looters.

GREG BEATO: The More We Spend On Higher Education, The More We Spend On Higher Education. Things that can’t go on forever, won’t. More: “In the face of the Internet and other technologies that have made information and instruction cheaper and more accessible than ever, you might have predicted that the ever-expanding multiversities of the 1980s and 1990s would suffer the same fate as the music industry and the newspaper business. Instead, scope creep has functioned as an ingenious survival mechanism. . . . It’s true that for-profit institutions are raking in huge profits in large part because of federal subsidies. (The CEO of the holding company behind Strayer University made $41 million in 2009.) But it’s also true that few if any for-profits are using federal money to finance lengthy sabbaticals for high-paid professors who teach a handful of classes a year, or the athletic pursuits of undersized linebackers who should have hung up their cleats after graduating high school. Non-profit institutions of higher learning have been using federal money to make sure American college kids are the tannest, best-fed, most vigorously administrated students in the world for decades now. For a little extra credit, our elected officials should start holding them more accountable too.”

MARKDOWNS ON fitness videos.

WHY THEY’D RATHER TALK ABOUT SARAH PALIN (CONT’D): IMF to US: Better Start Taking Care Of Business. Plus this: “Offering the discretionary-spending freeze as an answer to the IMF’s legitimate concern is akin to telling your mortgage holder that you’ve started an austerity program by deciding not to buy more pay-per-view porn each month than in the previous few years.”