Groundhog Has Friends

Groundhog has friends in high places:

“Now it turns out, Punxsutawney Phil is little more than a scapegoat,” the prosecutor in Ohio’s Butler County, Mike Gmoser, wrote Tuesday after Phil’s handler took responsibility for flubbing the forecast.

...When Punxsutawney Phil was taken from his hibernation hole Feb. 2 and held aloft in front of thousands of people in Gobbler's Knob, Pa., his handler, Bill Deeley, quoted him as saying he had not seen his shadow. In groundhog lore, that means spring is imminent.

Gmoser's indictment accused the groundhog -- a species often known as a woodchuck -- of misrepresenting an early spring and called for the death penalty. But Deeley, president of the Punxsutawney Groundhog Club's Inner Circle, stepped up Monday to save Phil, saying he had failed to correctly interpret the animal's "groundhog-ese."