Sen. Harry Reid’s Republican opponent —

Update: I’ve been trying to calculate how many chickens you’d need to pay for, say, an appendectomy. I found a website that says an appendectomy goes for $15,850, these days, on average. That seems low to me, but let’s go with it. I couldn’t find a price for live adult chickens, but you can buy baby chicks in bulk for about $1.60 each, according to one supplier I found. That’s 9,906 baby chicks for one appendectomy. Pretty soon, ol’ Doc can quit medicine and become a supplier for Tyson Inc.!

Or, you can go to the other extreme and pay with a chicken ready for cooking. Right now my local grocery has whole roaster chickens on sale for .99 a pound, and the circular says the birds run from five to seven pounds. Let’s round that up to a dollar a pound to make my life easier. You can give the doc 15,850 pounds of chicken, or 2,641 and 2/3 chickens, figuring six pounds to a chicken. Hope Doc has a big freezer.

Update: See “Chickens for Checkups.”