The Week in Chicken News

(April 23) -- With Wall Street reform, illegal immigration and the volcano in Iceland getting so much attention lately, another hot news topic has flown under the radar: Chickens.

The week's biggest chicken-flavored flap involves Sue Lowden, the leading GOP candidate to unseat the Senate's top Democrat, Nevada's Harry Reid. Lowden didn't just double down (apologies to KFC, but more on them later), she tripled down on her call for people to barter for their health care.

"Let's change the system and talk about what the possibilities are. I'm telling you that this works. You know, before we all started having health care, in the olden days, our grandparents, they would bring a chicken to the doctor," Lowden said on a Reno TV show Monday. "I'm not backing down from that system."

The Democratic Senate Campaign Committee quickly launched a satirical "Chickens for Checkups" site. Someone at the Talking Points Memo blog did the math for a "chicken-based health care economy." (Chickens needed to cover U.S. health care costs: 459 billion. Estimated worldwide chicken population: 16 billion. Uh oh.)

Headline writers around the Web went free-range with poultry gags: Chicken Wingnut; Lowden Playing Chicken With Harry Reid -- And Losing; Keep Bartering That Chicken, Sue Lowden (an homage to New York news anchor Ernie Anastos' famed fowl-language blooper).

On Thursday, Lowden accused Reid of trying to make her look bad and "change the subject from his 2,700 pages of government-run health care," the Nevada Appeal reported.

But this week, the subject is chickens -- even if a couple of fast-food giants might like to change that.

PETA pecked at McDonald's -- already under fire for not using eggs from cage-free hens -- with an ad released Thursday that brought actress Bea Arthur back from the dead. It scolded McDonald's not so much for killing chickens but for the way it does so. PETA said Arthur left money in her will for the group to "pressure McDonald's to switch to a less violent, USDA-approved chicken-slaughter method."

Meanwhile, KFC is denying reports that its new no-bun Double Down chicken sandwich has twice as many calories and grams of fat as the company claims. And its Buckets for the Cure promotion is generating buckets of bad publicity. The chicken chain has teamed up Susan G. Komen for the Cure to support breast cancer research. KFC said it's raised more than $1.8 million this month by selling chicken in special pink buckets, which have the names of breast cancer victims and survivors printed on them.

"But the money and commemorative touches have done nothing to quell criticism about the ties between the charity and a company that sells fat-laden foods, which have been found to predispose women to breast cancer," The Chronicle of Philanthropy reported. The headline on Care2.com was more blunt: KFC Peddling Cancer-Causing Food in Pink Buckets.

Need another reason not to eat chicken? Bolivia's leftist President Evo Morales claims it makes men bald and gay.

"The chicken we eat is loaded with female hormones. So, when men eat it, they tend to deviate from their manhood," Morales told an audience at a climate change summit this week. Critics across the blogosphere cackled.

"Hard call: Who is deploying chickens in the service of dubious political positions in a more ludicrous manner: Sue Lowden or Evo Morales?," wondered The New Yorker's Amy Davidson.

This week's chicken news phenomenon knows no boundaries. It is local -- as in Holyoke, Mass., where citizens are embroiled in a debate over whether they can keep chickens in their yards. And it is international -- as in Britain, where a man threw an egg at Conservative party leader David Cameron during a campaign appearance Wednesday.

Cameron, who's been trailed recently by a tabloid journalist dressed as a chicken, reportedly quipped afterward: "Now I know which came first, the chicken not the egg."