The News

 Punxsutawney Phil may get skewered for his iffy weather predictions, but his parties don't miss.

• I left Pittsburgh for Punxsutawney on a frigid Saturday night to mingle with a legion of fellow Phil fanatics and watch as he declared six more weeks of winter.

Zoom in: The legendary woodchuck ascends from his stump around 7:30am on Groundhog Day to give his forecast, but true believers poured into Gobbler's Knob at 3am when it opens. Some lined up for shuttles as early as 9pm the night before.

• Those who didn't want to wait hours for a shuttle to Gobbler's Knob — located two miles uphill from Punxsutawney — made the trek on foot through residential neighborhoods brimming with Phil inflatables and patient homeowners.
• Hotels in the area booked up six months to a year in advance, and the closest I could find last minute was 40 miles southwest of Punxsutawney.
• The festival includes fireworks, live music, costumes and rowdy chants of "Phil! Phil! Phil!" The crowd is diverse, ranging from tipsy college students to international visitors.

What they're saying: Alex Kearney and his girlfriend, Amy Owen, drove 15 hours from Kansas and waited nearly three hours for a shuttle, just to catch a glimpse of Phil. "We don't regret a minute of it," said Kearney, proudly wearing a groundhog onesie and a crown. "He's worth so much more."

• "We don't even have a hotel," Owen added. "We slept in our car. It was on a Sunday so it just made sense to come this year."
• Other travelers pulled all-nighters, noting they hadn't slept in 24 hours by the time Phil saw his shadow Sunday morning.

Zoom out: The festival spans several days starting with the Groundhog Ball, a formal soirée where tourists can rub elbows with the rodent's Inner Circle.

• The event exploded in popularity after the 1993 premiere of the Bill Murray blockbuster "Groundhog Day," with tens of thousands of people traveling to the borough of about 5,600 permanent residents each year.

The intrigue: Punxsutawney Groundhog Club members insist there has only been one Phil since the tradition began nearly 140 years ago — at least 15 times the typical lifespan of a groundhog raised in captivity.

• His supposed longevity comes from an "elixir of life" that's apparently not shared with his wife, Phyllis, or their two pups.

Fun facts: Phil has some political clout — his handlers say he's met former presidents Reagan and Carter, and three sitting Pennsylvania governors have attended the annual Groundhog Day ceremony.

• During the Prohibition era, he reportedly threatened to impose more than a year of winter on the community if he wasn't permitted a drink — implying he not only predicts the weather, but controls it.

The bottom line: He's often imitated, but a few hours with his devoted fans proves Phil is still top hog.

 Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger, the now-retired captain known for his heroic role in the “Miracle on the Hudson,” let out a deep sigh when asked Thursday about President Donald Trump’s remarks on the midair collision that left 67 people dead in Washington, D.C., this week.

“Not surprised. Disgusted,” said Sullenberger after several seconds of silence when MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell asked about the president and cautioned that he didn’t want to draw the pilot into “politics.”

The reaction from Sullenberger, who safely landed US Airways Flight 1549 on the Hudson River in 2009, saving the lives of all 155 people aboard, comes after Trump blamed diversity hiring at the Federal Aviation Administration for the deadly collision.

Sullenberger, in a 2018 op-ed for The Washington Post encouraging voter participation in the midterm elections, noted that he was a registered Republican “for the first 85 percent of my adult life” but added that he’s “always voted as an American.”

He’d go on to endorse Joe Biden in his 2020 campaign and, in an ad with VoteVets and the anti-Trump GOP group The Lincoln Project later that year, declared that Trump “failed us so miserably” in the “highest calling of leadership.”

“Now it’s up to us to overcome his attacks on our very democracy, knowing nearly a quarter million Americans won’t have a voice, casualties of his lethal lies and incompetence,” he said in the 2020 ad.

He’d later go on to serve as the U.S. representative to the International Civil Aviation Organization under Biden.

On Thursday, Sullenberger told O’Donnell he was “immediately devastated” when he heard the “shocking” news of the D.C. crash.

“It hit me deeply, intensely. The loss of those lives, those precious lives,” he said.

“I can imagine the families of those who are lost and the grief they must feel and they’re looking for some reason, some explanation that has yet, is not available to us, one day will be,” he added.

Sullenberger, who referred to the National Transportation Safety Board as the “gold standard” of accident investigation, said the probe is a “long process,” as he noted that it took 16 months for the final report on the 2009 Hudson River incident to be written.

He added that the NTSB investigation may require listening to a cockpit voice recorder, looking at a digital flight data recorder or “old-fashioned detective work.”

“But they will follow the truth, they will follow the facts wherever they lead,” he said of the NTSB.

“And we can have great confidence that the results will be found, they will be made public, and as we always do after such a tragedy, the entire industry will learn these terrible lessons that we learned at great cost,” Sullenberger added.