CARL KASELL: From NPR and WBEZ-Chicago, this is WAIT WAIT...DON'T TELL ME, the NPR News quiz. I'm Carl Kasell, and here's your host, at the Chase Bank Auditorium in downtown Chicago, Peter Sagal.
PETER SAGAL, HOST:
Thank you, Carl.
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SAGAL: Thank you all so much, great to see you. I'm excited, too. We have a great show for you today. We are excited to have Nancy Pelosi. She's the former Speaker of the House and the current Minority Leader, on to play our games. Now, we were doing some research about Ms. Pelosi. We did it online, of course, and people have got a lot interesting things to say about her.
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SAGAL: She's a pioneer in American politics and Satan returned to Earth in human form.
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SAGAL: So our first question will be, "Mrs. Pelosi, are those your real glowing eyes that we saw on the internet or are they just contacts?"
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SAGAL: First, it's your turn to answer some questions. Give us a call; the number is 1-888-Wait-Wait, that's 1-888-924-8924. It's time to welcome our first listener contestant. Hi, you're on WAIT WAIT...DON'T TELL ME.
MIKE DORF: Hi, this is Mike Dorf from Ithaca, New York.
SAGAL: Hey Mike, how are you?
DORF: I'm great, thanks.
SAGAL: Ithaca is a beautiful place, home to Cornell. What do you do there?
DORF: I am a law professor at Cornell University.
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SAGAL: Oh, really? Well, what a coincidence.
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DORF: It's a company town.
SAGAL: It is. It is. And what do you teach in law, your specialty?
DORF: Constitutional law and related subjects.
SAGAL: Really?
DORF: It's always a great time to be a constitutional law professor because they're always screwing something up.
SAGAL: They really are.
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DORF: Well, welcome to our show, Mike. Let me introduce you to our panel this week. First up, it's a contributor to CBS Sunday Morning and host of The Future Files, a new series for Georgia Public Broadcasting, Ms. Faith Salie is here.
FAITH SALIE: Hi, Mike.
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SAGAL: Next, it's the host of the podcast that is taking over the world, Too Beautiful to Live, Mr. Luke Burbank.
LUKE BURBANK: Hey, Mike.
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SAGAL: Finally, it's the man behind Esquire's politics blog and a contributor to Grantland, Mr. Charlie Pierce is here.
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CHARLIE PIERCE: What's up, Mike?
SAGAL: Mike, welcome to the show. You're going to play Who's Carl This Time. Carl Kasell is going to read you three quotations from the week's news. If you can correctly identify or explain just two of them, you'll win our prize, Carl's voice on your home answering machine. Are you ready to go?
DORF: Ready as I can be.
SAGAL: All right, we'll see how ready that is. Here is your first quotation.
KASELL: "They brought us whole binders full of women."
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SAGAL: Binders of them. That was one of the most talked about moments at a big event on Tuesday. What was it?
DORF: That was Governor Willard Mitt Romney explaining how he asked to see more women apply for jobs in his Massachusetts cabinet.
SAGAL: Yes, and he said it at what event?
DORF: Oh, at the presidential debate.
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SAGAL: Yeah, you assumed we were actually a much more smarter, difficult show than we are.
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SALIE: More smarter, yep.
SAGAL: A common error.
BURBANK: Mike's classes must be like seven hours long.
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SAGAL: So, yes, in presidential debate two, we learned that Mitt Romney has an organized, if troubling, way of storing women.
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SAGAL: And that President Obama managed to escape the basement where his evil, tranquilized twin had locked him away during the first debate.
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SAGAL: The President, of course, it would have been very hard for him not to beat the low expectations he set for himself the first time around.
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SAGAL: The first question for the president in this debate was from an EMT, who checked his vitals and asked him if he knew who the President was.
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SAGAL: But this time, President Obama was focused, he was feisty. He began his first answer by saying to Mitt Romney, "Hello, my name is Barack Obama. You killed my re-election chances. Prepare to die. "
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PIERCE: I will tell you, having been in the media center at the debate, that when "binders full of women" happened.
SAGAL: Yeah.
PIERCE: It was a Scooby-Doo moment for everybody in the building.
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PIERCE: Including, like the TV crews from China, who don't speak English.
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SAGAL: Well, what happened was, as you explained, he was asked specifically how he would help women in a Romney administration. And he talked about how, when he was governor of Massachusetts, he called for a quote, "binder full of women" that he might be able to hire for his cabinet.
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SAGAL: So he became the first person in history to talk about keeping women in binders who wasn't a madam or a serial killer.
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SAGAL: By the way, in case you were wondering, Binders Full of Women is the dirtiest thing that Mitt Romney has ever said.
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SAGAL: So, there was a lot of talk about Candy Crowley, at the debate. Everybody thought she did a good job. The best moment was when she called on somebody in the audience, and it turned out to be Jim Lehrer, ready, finally, to ask a good question.
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SAGAL: And there was the moment where Romney had accused President Obama of not using the word terror in regard to the Benghazi attacks and Obama said he had, and then Candy Crowley stepped in and corrected Romney right there - boom, done corrected, fact checked. This proved that the qualities that make a good debate moderator also make you the worst person to hang out with at a party.
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SAGAL: "No, I'm sorry, Harvey Dent didn't appear until the second Batman film, well, seventh if you count the non Christopher Nolan films."
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BURBANK: Don't you feel like, I mean how well the moderator does is mostly affected by physical proximity to the candidates? Like I feel like Martha Raddatz, in my opinion, probably did the best job so far. She was physically closest to them.
SAGAL: Yeah.
BURBANK: They were just sitting at a little table. Jim Lehrer did sort of the worst. He was really far away from them. And then Candy Crowley was kind of mid range.
SAGAL: Right.
SALIE: That's interesting.
BURBANK: Could there be something to just shackling everybody, like...
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SAGAL: You think Bob Schieffer for the third debate should have his arms around both of them and go, guys...
BURBANK: Yeah, exactly. Exactly.
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BURBANK: Just get them in like a huddle. Or at the very least get one of those, like, invisible fence shock collar...
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BURBANK: ...things and then just every time they go over, it's a gentle reminder, Peter, that two minutes means two minutes.
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SAGAL: All right, very good, Mike, here is your next quote.
KASELL: Why's everyone so freaked out? This guy rode his bike and did a ton of drugs. Well, so did I in high school.
SAGAL: That was a tweet from someone name Mallory Ortberg, talking about the big doping scandal involving whom?
DORF: That would be Lance Armstrong.
SAGAL: Yes, Lance Armstrong, of course.
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SAGAL: Remember - yes, Lance Armstrong.
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SAGAL: Remember Lance Armstrong's Memoir, it was titled "It's Not About The Bike?" Well, he was telling the truth.
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SAGAL: We should have read on through the subtitle, it was it's not about the bike; it's about the four gallons of horse testosterone coursing through my system.
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BURBANK: I will say that everybody is treating this like its such a negative. But I feel like, I mean we're hearing all this stuff about energy independence and clearly, his urine could power a small United States city.
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SAGAL: This is also true - I love this detail - that sometimes they would go into their hotel rooms on the road, and they'd take down the paintings from the walls of the hotel so they could hang their blood bags from them while they did, you know...
PIERCE: It's better than most of the art, by the way.
SAGAL: Yeah, I know.
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SAGAL: And then it would be embarrassing when somebody came into the room while they were doing this. Like, oh yeah, the décor in here is weird. I guess the hotel did it up in Early Vampire, I guess.
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SAGAL: Very good.
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SAGAL: I was warned about that one, but I'm stubborn. What can I tell you?
BURBANK: He's also off of the performance enhancing drugs that he's been taking.
SAGAL: Apparently, yeah.
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SAGAL: It's hard.
BURBANK: It's fairly obvious.
SAGAL: It's really hard to host this show straight.
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SAGAL: I feel like I owe it to my fans. All right, here is your last quote.
KASELL: Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.
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SAGAL: That's what we're sure Felix Baumgartner was saying Sunday as he did what?
DORF: He plummeted to earth from a hot air balloon way, way high up in the sky.
SAGAL: How high exactly, that's your point?
DORF: Uh...
SAGAL: I'm kidding. No, you're right. Of course, you're right.
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SAGAL: Daredevil Felix Baumgartner jumped from a balloon almost 24 miles above the earth on Sunday. He broke a number of records, including highest parachute jump, as well as the record for highest existential crisis.
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SAGAL: Highest expletive ever uttered. We had a radio link, we who were watching online on earth. We couldn't hear, though, what he said when he jumped from the capsule, but it might have been "I should have worn the brown space suit."
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SAGAL: I don't know why we're celebrating this guy. I mean he just fell. I can do that.
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SAGAL: We should be cheering gravity. Way to go, elemental force.
PIERCE: I was going to say, wouldn't it have been a terrible surprise if he jumped and he realized he had, like, drifted out of the earth's gravity and started...
SAGAL: That would have been bad.
PIERCE: He didn't plan on that, I don't think.
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SAGAL: And even though the trip was sponsored by Red Bull, the Red Bull Stratos, it was called, he couldn't actually drink any or bring any with him because the pressure would make that stuff even more deadly than it is here on earth.
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SAGAL: It was so ironic. The same week that the space shuttle was finally mothballed, a soft drink company achieves this huge milestone in space exploration. I mean, maybe we should privatize everything the government does.
PIERCE: I'm looking forward to staying at the Doritos moon base.
SAGAL: I know.
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SAGAL: Carl, how did Mike do on our quiz?
KASELL: Congratulations, Mike, you had three correct answers, so you win our prize.
SAGAL: Well done, Mike. Congratulations.
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DORF: Thank you very much.
SAGAL: Thanks for playing.
DORF: My pleasure. Thank you.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.