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The federal government shutdown began early Tuesday morning after Congress failed to pass a budget by a deadline of midnight Monday, and many Bay Area residents are still gauging how the shutdown will affect them.
One of the most obvious impacts is to those who were planning trips to National parks, which are closed — including Alcatraz Island, Fort Point and Fort Baker, Lands End and Muir Woods National Monument.
Visitor centers like the Lands End Lookout are not open, and the parks’ websites are not being maintained.
Those who had purchased boat trips to Alcatraz will be given refunds or can take a 90-minute Bay tour instead for the same price. Those trips leave from Pier 33 and will be “Alcatraz-focused” but passengers will not be able to get onto the island.
About 5,000 Alcatraz trips had been previously booked for Tuesday, according to Denise Rasmussen, director of salesand marketing for Alcatraz Cruises.
To lift disappointed tourists’ spirits, the San Francisco bar Gold Dust Lounge at Fisherman’s Wharf will be offering two-for-one drink specials
to those holding tickets for Alcatraz cruises.
The drink discount will be offered “until Republicans to sober up,” bar publicist Lee Houskeeper said, tongue-in-cheek.
Yosemite National Park, where many Bay Area residents head for camping and hiking, is closed today with most staff furloughed. Visitors who
are already in Yosemite are required to leave by Thursday afternoon.
Ironically, today is the 123rd anniversary of the park’s creation, and Google is saluting the quiet milestone with a “Google Doodle” on the search engine’s homepage.
The federal shutdown is only affecting services deemed “non-essential.”
Post offices will still be open, security checkpoints at airports will still be operating, and air traffic controllers will stay on the job.
Military personnel will remain on duty and will still be paid.
Agencies that deal in national security, public safety, and “essential” programs such as Social Security will remain operating to some extent during the shutdown.
The last federal shutdown began at the end of 1995 and lasted 21 days.
This is the way the government punishes our people. I say get rid of whole departments and fire these idiots. No more retirement packages. No more voting yourselves pay raises and perks. Give us back our parks. Give us back our schools. Give us back our transportation and health care. I can do a better job. Private industry and capitalism should prevail. Accountability is a requirement and yet we see none in government… Now public parks can no longer be enjoyed by the public… And the government is here to help?!… I mean, the government is great NSA…
Well now I can sleep easier that the government employees who read my email are still doing so.
To Huh…you hit the nail on the with your input.
I happen to think you and everyone like you are correct…the trouble is very few are listening.
I am sure all DC perks for the politicians are open. This admin is a damn shame. But to be honest, we the people are the blame. (NOT ME, I HAD NOTHING TO DO WITH IT). Young White guilt, Naive Black and Latino folks…those are the people that believed all the BS from the “King of Lies”
Thanks for listening, Julia Pardini from Alamo
Let’s be clear, the government shutdown is 100% on the Republican congress. 100%. Never in the history of our government, has a congress tried to repeal legislation that passed all legitimate votes in Congress (the Affordable Health Care Act) and was further upheld by the Supreme Court, by attaching it to a federal government funding vote. One thing has nothing to do with the other and it has no place being attached to the funding of our government. Never. Ever. For the Democratic senate to give in to such bullying extortion would have set a precedent that would have been the equivalent of giving in to hostage takers demands, knowing full well that the hostage takers would then just continue to take hostages and continue to make more demands. There’d be no end. Another analogy I heard was the equivalent of losing a football game 37-12 (the Republicans losing the Affordable Health Care fight). Then, after the game, the Republicans taking all of the fans of the game hostage and saying that unless the winning team (The Democrats) give them 26 points to change the outcome of the game, they’re going to kills the fans of the game. What would you do? As to private industry and capitalism and their role here? Well, as it relates to healthcare, private industry and capitalism have failed. We’ve tried that and learned it doesn’t work. Healthcare costs have risen at unsustainable levels for years and are the #1 contributor to the damage of our national economy. To continue down the path of allowing private industry and capitalism to run our healthcare system is insanity. We’re the only, the only, the one and only, Westernized nation in the world that does not have some form of national health care system. What kind of arrogance and ignorance would suggest that everyone else is wrong and we are right?
Whatever your position on Obamacare might be, the tactic being used by the right wing extremists in the House has to be rejected, for the reasons Dan Parnas has stated. To be a nation of laws you have to abide by the result when you lose. The Tea Party lost on Obamacare the first time around. They had their chance to earn the votes to repeal it and they lost. Obamacare was a major issue in the last election and a majority of voters voted for Democrats – Presidential, Senate and House candidates alike. A significant majority of Americans want either Obamacare or single payer. Only the minority dead-enders are rooting for a repeal of the ACA and seeking to impose their will on the majority by threatening to harm the entire nation unless they get what they want. What the Republicans in the House are doing is the legislative equivalent of terrorism, plain and simple.
Incidentally, in 2011 the Senate voted to cut off the salaries of the elected officials in Congress if the government was shut down. The Republican House “leadership” refused to even bring that bill to a vote, and Ted Cruz, the man most responsible for government being shut down, has publicly declared that he will continue to draw his salary. Draw your own conclusions.
My suggestion let the tea party and their states form their own country.
This includes:
No regulations
No healthcare
Everyone will be armed to the teeth
Build large fence around each state ie, Texas,Georgia etc
Ted Cruz as president
Cruz and Paul must relinquish their Cadillac lifetime medical benefits
I am so tired of these elite hypocrites. Throw them out of office.
One of the things I find interesting about the various park shutdowns is that the the act of shutting down will cost the government MORE than leaving the park(s) open. Why? Because the furloughed employees will end up getting their back pay, anyway. But the revenue lost (admissions fees, tickets, lodging, concessions) is just forfeited.
Much has been made about Yosemite being closed, and people in the lodges, hotel, and campgrounds being given 48 hours to exit. The lodgings in the park are run by a private company, in some form of profit-sharing arrangement. So the staff isn’t made up of government employees. They’re just being prevented from working. As a result, significant revenue is just being forfeited.
A worse example is the “shutdown” of the WWII Memorial on the Capitol Mall in DC. This is an “open”, outdoor memorial, similar in basic nature to the Viet Nam “wall”. In other words, no entrances to staff, nothing needed for it to remain open. So what do the geniuses in the National Park Service do? They spend additional money to erect barricades around the monument, to “shut it down”.
Given these feats of bureaucratic brilliance, the administration of Obamacare should go swimmingly…
Here here Jimmy!
I’ve been saying the same thing since I was old enough to drink & drive.
but what I would do is just build one really long, tall 440 volt fence (because you know how much the righty’s, trailer dwellers, teaberries, and minutemen love their fences) that wraps around the west border of Texas, along the top, runs east & makes a slight upward bend bend around South Carolina. I mean, that sort of leaves West Virginia (where men are men and the sheep are afraid), Arizona, and northern Idaho (honest sheriff, she’s not my sister!) out of the loop, but we can deal with them later.
Otherwise, I say we enact your suggestions into law immediately.
CRM,
There is a solemn quote from a notable individual in our country’s history that was intended to force pause, thoughtful consideration and the greatest angst before taking ‘the plunge’ into darker societal realities.
Is the cavalcade of evidence put in front of today’s all consuming television audience not but provided to offer some credible evidence that moving further to the edge only draws us closer to a fissionable reaction that we may not be able to stop? In a poorly analogous manner, is not having a child ticketed for speeding enough cause for caution and correction then to wait till something far worse occurs?
Perhaps the you are one who feels that this struggle should simply play out for those that would bore themselves with CSPAN throughout the day. To envision your point, you seem to consider it ‘better’ if we could just simply figure out who one or lost in these negotiations like reading box scores in the paper? We are all tired of this kind of poor Kabuki Theater. However, I for one believe that the tell-tale signs of a shut-down are simply early warning indicators to all of us that it is time to pull-out of this dive before not even autopilot can save our sorry souls.
Oh, the notable quote…”It is well that war is so terrible, or we would grow too fond of it”, General Robert E. Lee after the battle of Fredericksburg, VA in 1862. A battle that he ‘won’ but virtually all historians agree was a seminal turning point to eventually losing the war.
Actually, CRM, although there are concessionaires in Yosemite, their continued operation relies on infrastructure operated by federal employees – water, sewer, power, trash, rangers who provide traffic and police services, etc. All kinds of bad things would be likely to happen if visitors were allowed to stay in what is now a small city in the mountains. Yosemite had to be closed the last time the Republicans shut down the government, too – back in the 90’s.
Your knee-jerk “If it’s Obama, it must be bad” is predictable but unbecoming. I understand that the Republican mantra is that everything that government does is bad, but that’s mostly because simplistic ideologues take for granted and are blind to all of the necessary if unromantic stuff that has to be done in the background to make our modern society function – and engage in armchair quarterbacking about everything they do notice.