Punxsutawney Phil Sees Shadow; Predicts Six More Months of Newt Gingrich

Folks in Pennsylvania have been complaining for years about all the taxpayer money they spend on lavishing their resident star groundhog, Punxsutawney Phil, with the best hole in the county and some of the finest fruits and vegetables around. For what they’re spending, they don’t feel they are getting much more than a quick peek out the hole every year to see how much more of a winter they have to endure.

So this year they decided to make the groundhog work a little harder for his fame and have given him a second job, that of political predictalator. Just as Paul the Psychic Octopus became famous predicting the winners in the last Soccer World, Punxsutawney Phil or just “Phil the Predictalator” as he is now known, was given a chance to predict just how much more voters had to endure of one particular candidate for President, Newt Gingrich.

“At first,” said Mayor John Rhodent, “we thought we should use an actual newt to predict the length of stay of Gingrich on the political scene, but after several attempts at pinning one down (they are extremely slimy and hard to catch), we decided to just tack on the job to Phil’s other duties.”

Asked why they were only interested in how much longer Newt Gingrich would run and not the other three candidates, including the frontrunner, Mitt Romney, Rhodent said this “Don’t know really. Guess someone made the connection between a large rodent and Gingrich. That and the fact that we’d all had a bit too much to drink night before last, and the more we thought about it, we figured ‘why the hell not?’”