Reuters:

Overflowing rivers in Iowa and other Midwest states forced evacuations and disrupted the region's economy on Friday with fears of worse to come from fragile levees and more rain.

A Cedar Rapids hospital was flooded and evacuated its patients after a levee break on the Cedar River turned the downtown area into a shallow lake. Thousands were forced to leave their homes in the worst Midwest flooding in 15 years. [..]

Iowa Gov. Chet Culver said the damage to his state could cost billions of dollars. Scores of bridges spanning nine overflowing rivers have been swept away or weakened.

Clean, safe drinking water is a major concern right now. If there are local rescue agencies that can help in all the affected areas, please leave their names in the comments for other C&Lers.

CNN:

Sen. Edward Kennedy was rushed to Cape Cod Hospital in Massachusetts Saturday morning, a well-informed, prominent Democratic source in that state told CNN.

The source said the 76-year-old senator had "symptoms of a stroke."

Kennedy was taken to the hospital around 8 or 9 a.m. from the Kennedy family compound in Hyannis, according to the source. The source said the senator would be transferred to Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston.

That hospital said it had no information on Kennedy.

Kennedy has represented Massachusetts in the Senate since 1962. He is one of only six senators in U.S. history to serve more than 40 years. He is known as a liberal champion of social issues such as health care, family leave, and the minimum wage. Read on...

Please send your prayers and thoughts to Senator Kennedy and his family. We'll bring you more updates as they become available.

UPDATE: It now appears that doctors believe Senator Kennedy had a seizure, not a stroke as was previously suspected.

CJOnline: (h/t J & Scarce)

The Shawnee County Sheriff's Office on Tuesday released the identity of a Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co. employee who died Sunday after being tased by a sheriff's deputy.

The man who died was Walter E. Haake Jr., 59, of Lawrence. However, the sheriff's office released no other details about what led to the tasing at the Topeka Goodyear plant.

Early reports indicated Haake had been suffering from a medical condition and had resisted emergency personnel's efforts to subdue him. The sheriff's office said after several attempts to control Haake, a deputy used a Taser on him.

Haake was taken by ambulance to a Topeka hospital and later pronounced dead. Read on...

Here we go again. We've covered some of the recent incidents involving tasers, and just last week an 11 year old girl was tased in school to "stop a violent temper tantrum." This one ranks right up there with the worst of them and is sure to reignite the taser debate. I realize that all the facts of this incident haven't been released, but it was known that this man suffered from a medical condition that was serious enough that his employer was trying to keep him from driving himself home -- this should have been a no-brainer and the deputies should have found a better way to handle this situation.

*Update: New details have been released and it appears Haake had fallen down some stairs at home before going to work that day and he was actually tased 3 times before being thrown to the ground and handcuffed. He quickly became unresponsive and they performed CPR for 20 minutes before they removed his handcuffs.

Via ABC:

A federal prosecutor accused of flying to Detroit last month to have sex with a 5-year-old girl committed suicide Friday in his cell in a Milan federal prison.

Assistant U.S. Attorney John D.R. Atchison was found unresponsive, taken to a local hospital and pronounced dead at 10:17 a.m., Federal Bureau of Prisons spokeswoman Felicia Ponce said.

Atchison, of Gulf Breeze, Fla., was being held in a special housing unit in the prison, about 36 miles southwest of Detroit. Read more...

A Final, Tragic Note:

NYTimes:  "Engaging in the banalties of life has become a death-defying act," the seven soldiers wrote of the war they had seen in Iraq.

They were referring to the ordeals of Iraqi citizens, trying to go about their lives with death and suffering all around them. They did not know it at the time, but they might almost have been referring to themselves.

Two of the soldiers who wrote of their pessimism about the war, in an Op-Ed article that appeared in The New York Times on Aug. 19, were killed in Baghdad on Monday. They were not killed in combat, nor on a daring mission. They died when the five-ton cargo truck they were riding in overturned.

dKos: The AP has reported on Yance Gray here, and KHOU, a Houston-area TV station has reported on Omar Mora here.

Gray leaves a wife and infant daughter.  Mora was scheduled to return home this November, instead, he leaves behind a wife and a five year old daughter.  Per E&P: one of the other five authors of the Times piece, Staff Sergeant Jeremy Murphy, an Army Ranger and reconnaissance team leader, was shot in the head while the article was being written. He was expected to survive after being flown to a military hospital in the United States.

There are no words.

Via Talk2Action:

George Bush's nominee for Surgeon General has drawn a lot of heat for among other things, his crack-pot anti-gay views as a leader in the United Methodist affiliate of the Institute on Religion and Democracy. But a new report may finally sink his already controversial nomination in a sea of conflicts of interest that have marked his career.

Dr. James Holsinger has also been a longtime leader of the Confessing Movement in the United Methodist Church. The Confessing Movement is a rightwing "renewal group" affiliated with the Washington, DC-based Institute on Religion and Democracy (IRD), whose purpose for a generation has been to divide and disrupt the historic churchs of mainline protestantism in the interests of advancing neoconservatism and the religious right.

Holsinger was elected to the highest court in the Methodist Church a time when the IRD-affiliated church "renewal" groups had launched efforts to use church judicial systems to enforce their notions of orthodoxy, particularly on matters related to homosexuality.

Now, an investigation Rev. Andrew J. Weaver, Ph.D. and Lawrence H. McGaughey, Esq., and published at Media Transparency, shows that Holsinger used the sale of a United Methodist Church-owned hospital in Kentucky, as a cash cow for his personal ambitions. It took years of litigation by the church to find out what had happened to its money, only to learn that Holsinger had diverted millions to endow professorships at the Chandler Medical Center at the University of Kentucky where he served as Chancellor and fundraiser-in-chief. Read more...

MSNBC:

Chief Justice John Roberts was taken to a hospital in Maine on Monday after falling while on vacation, the Supreme Court told NBC News.

Roberts, 52, fell at his summer home between 2 and 3 p.m. ET off Port Clyde. The court said he was taken to a hospital as a precaution.

An emergency medical technician said Roberts was conscious and alert during the ambulance ride, NBC News' Pete Williams reported.

UPDATE: MSNBC is now reporting it as a "seizure" described as "isolated, idiosyncratic".  It is apparently not the first time Justice Roberts has suffered from such seizures.

NavyTimes:

Navy veteran David Miller said that when he checked into the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Iowa City, he didn't realize he would get a hard sell for Christian fundamentalism along with treatment for his kidney stones.

Miller, 46, an Orthodox Jew, said he was repeatedly proselytized by hospital chaplains and staff in attempts to convert him to Christianity during three hospitalizations over the past two years.

He said he went hungry each time because the hospital wouldn't serve him kosher food, and the staff refused to contact his rabbi, who could have brought him something to eat.[..]

He described the Iowa City facility as an institution permeated by government sponsorship of fundamentalist Christianity and unconstitutional discrimination against Jews.[..]

The hospital's chaplains and staff, Miller said, have the attitude that you either accept Jesus Christ as your personal savior and you are saved, or you are damned.

He said he has tried to resolve the problems with the hospital's administration without success.

This should never have happened in the United States. We're becoming a third world nation before our very eyes.

WaPo: (h/t Pach)

Twelve-year-old Deamonte Driver died of a toothache Sunday.

A routine, $80 tooth extraction might have saved him.

If his mother had been insured.

If his family had not lost its Medicaid.

If Medicaid dentists weren't so hard to find.

If his mother hadn't been focused on getting a dentist for his brother, who had six rotted teeth.

By the time Deamonte's own aching tooth got any attention, the bacteria from the abscess had spread to his brain, doctors said. After two operations and more than six weeks of hospital care, the Prince George's County boy died.

Deamonte's death and the ultimate cost of his care, which could total more than $250,000, underscore an often-overlooked concern in the debate over universal health coverage: dental care.

CBS:

Two months after his brain hemorrhage, South Dakota Sen. Tim Johnson has left a Washington hospital and entered a private rehabilitation facility, his office said Tuesday.

A spokeswoman refused to say whether the senator remained in Washington or was moved to a facility in South Dakota, citing family concerns about media scrutiny. "They just want him to focus on getting better and not worried about outside cameras snapping away," said spokeswoman Julianne Fisher.

[..]Johnson will continue undergoing physical, occupational and speech therapy at the private facility. Dr. Philip Marion, the hospital's chief of rehabilitation, said in a statement released by Johnson's office that the senator has made "great progress" and a final test showed no evidence the tangled arteries that triggered the senator's hemorrhage remain.

Part of Johnson's therapy has been to deal with weakness on his right side. Doctors have said the senator showed that weakness when he arrived at the hospital in December.

Johnson's office has said his recovery is expected to take several months, though he has been doing some work from his bed.
"He's reading memos, but he still needs time for recovery," Fisher said.