The effects on the economy from the government shutdown are much further-reaching than most people realize. We are in the process of selling our home. The purchaser is getting a federal FHA loan. The sale of our home has been stopped as no loans are being processed due to the shutdown. The shutdown is damaging our already fragile economic recovery. The forfeiture of pay is the least Congress can do to prove they are sincere in their efforts to provide a government worthy of our citizens and to prove that we are all in this together. It's time they start making decisions that not only affect us but also them.

The government shutdown has cost 800,000 individuals their paychecks. Lawmakers should not be able to furlough other government workers while being paid for their political tantrum. Locally, here in Colorado, the government shutdown has significantly slowed our rebuilding efforts after a devastating flood. The shutdown has also made access to Estes Park--a town hard hit by the flood--even more difficult by closing one of two two-lane roads left by the flood for access. Personally, my husband was hired into a government position after a year and a half of almost no employment. He was working his government job for six weeks before the shutdown. If government officials want a shutdown, they should have to experience what a shutdown means to all the lives they are affecting.

Passenger service in northwest Connecticut was alive and well until 1971. After the service ceased much of the area has suffered and become a modern day ghost town. Freight cars utilize the existing rails on a daily basis and this project is "shovel ready" and has been on the back burner in Hartford. Restoring passenger service would not only boost the local economies, but attract tourism, give families easy access to children at area private schools, and create a pathway to the Massachusetts line which has been funded and is underway. Let's fill in the gap. Toot Toot!!

Fracking poses enormous dangers to our food and water supply, air quality, and soil, and therefore to human health and welfare. It involves known carcinogens and neurotoxins and does irreparable damage. It poisons wildlife.

As an anonymous researcher at the NIH, my experiments have been devastated by the shutdown. I keep hearing the stories from my friends: Months of work with cell cultures that require daily tending is down the tubes. Sensitive behavioral training and testing is ruined. Animals will have to be destroyed when we get back to work because, sadly, they will be useless as research models (imagine a partial-inducement of Parkinson's Disease in a rodent: what can you do with this now that it is not characterizing anything in the human?). Humans enrolled as research subjects--something that takes months of paperwork and coordination--will likely not return for follow-up testing because timing is critical on these types of experiments. The list goes on and on. As a post-doc, and after a long haul of education and training, I make very little money. I work every weekend and many nights, but I love what I do. I do it because I believe in basic science. It's one of the most noble careers, because for me, it represents a quest for truth. And I feel white hot anger that these elected "representatives" toy with federal funding like it's play Monopoly money. I'm just one story. But I know I represent the vast majority of government-employed basic science researchers who are sitting at home right now wondering what they can do. So I hope you will sign this. A voice of reason is only as strong as those that join with it. Please help me get a message to Congress--maybe they'll quit ignoring some of us on the ground.

I, like most of the citizens of the U.S., have an overall dissatisfaction with our elected Senators and Representatives, with little to no recourse when they do not perform their responsibilities at a high level. As shown in public opinion approval polls, Congress receives 10-15% approval ratings with no accountability other than to not re-elect them 2-6 years during elections. The citizens of the United States should be able to fire elected officials who continue to not work for their constituents.

In an interview on the morning on Friday, Oct. 4 with WHP-TV, Gov. Tom Corbett laughingly compared same-sex relationships to incest. Recently arguing against a county clerk who’d begun issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples, lawyers for the state's Department of Health suggested that those couples were just like 12-year-old children in being ineligible for marriage, but Corbett told WHP-TV anchor Sherry Christian that incest would be a better comparison, saying: "I think a much better analogy would have been brother and sister, don’t you?" Sherry Christian rightly seemed stunned by the governor's comment. It is a shocking example of bigotry and the governor must apologize without delay!

The welfare of our country and its citizens should be the top priority of our elected officials. It is ridiculous that elected officials can make such rash decisions that have an enormous impact on the income and economy of the American people while avoiding any effects themselves.

Closing the government affects tens of thousands of honest, hardworking employees, and their families, and because their services are unavailable, the security and economy of the nation is being put at risk.

Congress, in its unwillingness to compromise on a budget, has unnecessarily shut down the government. Hundreds of thousands of federal employees will be unpaid throughout the shutdown. Members of Congress should do the decent thing and forgo their wages for the same period. Our elected representatives at every level are voted in to represent us and our interests. Without a forfeit of wages, the officials making these decisions prove further that they are out of touch with the common citizen. The rash decision to shut down the government is damaging our already fragile economic recovery. The forfeiture of pay is the least they can do to prove that they are sincere in their efforts to provide a government worthy of its citizens.

This petition is designed to help put our government back to work and to right the wrongs created by the recent shutdown of the federal government. Our country's security is at risk and too many people, including children and families, have been hurt by the recent shutdown, which needs to end immediately.

The members of Congress are out of touch with the people of the United States. The pains of delays in Social Security payments, National Guard furloughs, and farm payments are ones that the members of Congress should be feeling.