For every Thanksgiving Day grocery shopper procrastinator who hasn't picked up the essentials, Melissa Clark, our food contributor and food writer for The New York Times, offers us wisdom. Where can you best put your money to work for you at the Thanksgiving table? The turkey or the side dishes? (click through for Melissa's tips and her recipe for Spicy Sweet Potato and Red Pepper Hash)

Celeste Headlee sits down for an after-air conversation about the first mass-market rap single, "Rapper's Delight," which was released by The Sugarhill Gang 30 years ago this week. She's joined by hip hop musician Paul Miller (better known as DJ Spooky) and Keith Shocklee, who produced Public Enemy with The Bomb Squad.

The Ms. Senior America Pageant is not exactly your grandmother’s pageant ... because your grandmother could be in it!  For 38 years the pageant has been promoting the idea that seniors are active, vibrant and useful members of society.  Every year, state queens compete for the title of Ms. Senior America. The Takeaway’s Femi Oke reports from the 2009 pageant, held at Harrah’s Casino in Atlantic City, New Jersey.

To find out more about senior pageants: www.senioramerica.org

Unemployment numbers are due out this morning and economic analyst Lakshman Achuthan, Managing Director of the Economic Cycle Research Institute, joins us with his predictions. In April, Lakshman predicted that we’d be coming out of the recession this summer. We wanted to road test some of your ideas, so The Takeaway's Femi Oke went looking in unusual places for indications on how the economy is doing. First stop: the ASPCA in New York City, where the rates of pet adoptions tend to follow people's economic well-being. Could the dogs here give us a peek at which direction the economy is going?

Next stop: Wall Street, but not to visit the banks. Instead, Femi spoke with cobbler Minas Polychronakis, who for over 30 years has been repairing shoes for rich and poor alike.

Let's say you're a musician and a news junkie, and you want to combine the two. If you were really talented, you might end up with something like the work of musical brothers Evan and Michael Gregory. They use the sound tool "Autotune," often used by rappers like T-Pain and Kanye West, to make music with the news. Evan and Michael, two of the four members of The Gregory Brothers, join us with more on how they Autotune the News.

Continue reading for the Gregory Brothers' remixing of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr, news personalities, as well as John and Femi.

Let's say you're a musician and a news junkie, and you want to combine the two. If you were really talented, you might end up with something like the work of musical brothers Evan and Michael Gregory. They use the sound tool "Autotune," often used by rappers like T-Pain and Kanye West, to make music with the news. Evan and Michael, two of the four members of The Gregory Brothers, join us with more on how they Autotune the News.

Continue reading for the Gregory Brothers' remixing of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr, news personalities, as well as John and Femi.

If the food you served on your kitchen table were to star in a film, the cast would probably not be all that surprising.

• Steak: lean, dark and juicy- obviously the romantic lead.
• Chicken: any way you dress it- the comic relief…
• And tofu: the shape-shifting villain willing to take on multiple forms…

But nowhere in the script is there a role for buttermilk. Unless that film is made by Joe York, starring Tennessee farmer Earl Cruze. Cruze and his buttermilk are the stars of York's documentary "Buttermilk: It Can Help," screening at this year's NYC Food Film Festival.

Takeaway producer Jesse Baker went to the opening night of the festival to gauge New Yorkers' response to Cruze and his buttermilk.

Click through to watch the buttermilk documentary, "Buttermilk: It Can Help."

Food writer Mark Bittman's first book, "Fish: The Complete Guide to Buying and Cooking," explored the glory of piscine cuisine. But when offered the opportunity to revise the book, he declined. Overnight shipping of loads of fish cargo, farm-raising and over-fishing have turned buying and eating fish into an ethical and ecological quagmire. Mark Bittman joined The Takeaway to explain his reasons for being more selective about which fish end up on his plate.

I spoke with Gregg Forrest, who owns and runs Layers Bakery with his wife Jeanne in Henderson, Nevada. Early voting started on October 18, but Forrest has been running an unofficial poll for several weeks from his bakery counter with some startlingly accurate results.

UPDATE:
The Layers cookie poll finished up with 467 “O-Biden” cookies to 352 for “McPalin.” (That’s 57% to 42%.) The bakery’s polling accuracy continued to be uncannily dead-on: the official voting results for Nevada showed 55% for Obama, 42% for McCain. (This is only a guess, but perhaps if Layers had offered (and sold) a handful of third-party cookies, they’d have been even closer to the final results.)

The most accurate polls around might be a little on the unconventional side: Halloween mask sales, schoolchildren, coffee cups, and cookies.

Mary Beth Williams hits the streets of New York to look at this year's "Xtreme" polls:

A recent ruling in Ohio by a federal appeals court has ruled in favor of the Republican Party. Thousands of new voter registrations now need to be reviewed to prevent voter fraud. Critics of the ruling say it’s unnecessary and could result in purging legitimate voters from the rolls.

In 2004, Muslim comics Preacher Moss and Azhar Usman formed "Allah Made Me Funny," a comedy tour based around the American-Muslim experience. Friday, an independent movie based on the tour opens for a one-week run in theaters across the country.

DENVER — Senator Hillary Clinton gave a rousing speech tonight, though her requests for her supporters to vote for Senator Obama fell on at least a few determinedly deaf ears.

In a crowded Denver office, I held my back to a widescreen television and a video camera on the crowd of PUMAs watching. PUMA ostensibly stands for "People United Mean Action," though anyone familiar with the group knows it colloquially stands for "Party Unity My Ass": a sharp retort from supporters of Clinton's presidential run to those pressuring them to get behind Obama's bid. Estimates of their numbers generally put them at a very small minority... but they're a very vocal minority for all of that.

From the screen behind me Clinton spoke naturally, as if she were talking to friends (no teleprompter stumbles), delivered a clear emotional arc over the course of the speech, recognized the accomplishments of her husband, President Bill Clinton, repeatedly told people that voting for Senator Barack Obama would be necessary to avoid the consequences of electing Republican Senator John McCain, and left the stage to waving signs and raucous cheers.

But it wasn't enough to convince the folks I was with at "The PUMA Den" – a Denver bail bond office repurposed for the evening's speech.

The crowd watched the speech as carried on Fox News, which obliged them by showing polls with McCain on top (big cheers!) and cutting away in the middle of former Virginia governor Mark Warner's speech for a commercial break that featured the latest ad for McCain, using Senator Clinton's own words. (Huge cheers for this, as well.)

Once the speech began, there was lots of yelling for Clinton herself, and whoops at any mention of John McCain — this from self-described "lifelong Democrats and feminists" — along with boos and hissing at any mention of Barack or Michelle Obama. The crowd fogged the building's windows with wounded anger.

There were some tears. The people I spoke with tonight love Senator Clinton profoundly. It's hard to overstate just how much. But despite Clinton's entreaties, only one PUMA at the Den said she'd even consider voting for Senator Obama come November. The rest said they intend to skip the polls or vote for McCain — a message to the Democratic National Committee and Howard Dean, whom they hold responsible for quashing Clinton's shot at the White House.

Guest: Andrea Bernstein, Takeaway Political Director

Guest: Andrea Bernstein, Takeaway Political Director

Guest: Takeaway Political Director Andrea Bernstein

Track the road trip at Your Billion Dollar President.

Anthrax timeline:

Late September, 2001
First signs
Envelopes containing threatening letters and a grainy brown substance arrive in the offices of ABC, CBS, NBC, and the New York Post.

October 5^th, 2001
A fatality
Robert Stevens, a photo editor for the Florida-based ...

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It's a matter of timing, politics and, in some cases, luck.

President George W. Bush won two and lost two. Richard Nixon got four of his six picks through. Ronald Reagan nominated five and only lost one. And Jimmy Carter didn't get a chance to nominate any.

The Supreme Court's ...