Greetings From the Granite State!

MANCHESTER, N.H.
My flight arrived late at Boston’s Logan Airport, and I ought to demand a refund from AirTran because their advertised in-flight WiFi service was out of order, which no one seemed to notice until the passenger in Seat 30D — that would be me — asked the flight attendant about it. Of course, none of the crew knew how to fix the problem and my expressions of anguished desperation were met with helpless shrugs of indifference.

“Customer service” is so 20th century.

Da Tech Guy was waiting curbside at Logan, his 1999 Buick Le Sabre fueled and read for the race up I-93 to New Hampshire. The question was where in New Hampshire? Pete had the Rick Santorum schedule. There was a 1 p.m. event in Tilton, but my delayed flight made that an iffy proposition. So we resolved to wait for the 3:30 p.m. event in Concord. This gave us time to stop off here at the McDonald’s near the Manchester airport where I can attempt to do some of what I would have done if the WiFi on that AirTran flight had been functional.

UPDATE: Just when you thought my idiot cousin Meghan couldn’t possibly make herself more obnoxious:

“If he had endorsed Santorum, I mean, I would be like slitting my wrists on the table right now,” Meghan McCain said about her father’s endorsement of Mitt Romney.”

This is another reason why conservatives should support Rick Santorum: Because I’m sure if he gets the nomination, Senator Santorum will ban Meghan from the convention in Tampa.

UPDATE II: Da Tech Guy has dubbed this McDonald’s “The Ray Kroc Memorial News Center.”

UPDATE III: I read the Des Moines Register on the plane, and they had several excellent follow-ups to the Iowa caucuses:

•  A chronology of how the historically close vote count was reported, which corrects a couple of items that were misreported by TV news on Tuesday night.
• An analysis of how and where the campaigns of Santorum, Mitt Romney and Ron Paul got their votes in Iowa, which includes this interesting detail:

In Jefferson County, in Iowa’s southeast corner, Paul won a stunning 49 percent of the vote, more than doubling next-place Santorum.
He also won there in 2008, his only first-place finish in that contest.
What gives?
County seat Fairfield is home to thousands of devotees of the Transcendental Meditation spiritual movement and site of the Maharishi University of Management, which is aligned with the movement.
Followers tend to share Paul’s views opposing military intervention and the Federal Reserve, said Bob Glade, the county’s GOP co-chairman.
“They had a campaign headquarters here for the last two months, and they were pushing real, real heavy,” Glade said of the Paul campaign.

Devotees of the Maharishi’s meditation cult in . . . Iowa? Damn. I mean, damn.

• William Petroski was the Des Moines Register reporter who was assigned the “second-tier” candidate that suddenly became the biggest story of the caucuses. He has an analysis today of Santorum’s prospects going forward, which includes this:

Iowa Secretary of State Matt Schultz, who endorsed Santorum in December, said he thought the former Pennsylvania senator has a chance as a national candidate, adding that his Iowa momentum should be a boon for fundraising.
Anyone who heard Santorum’s post-caucuses speech on Tuesday night would be impressed, Schultz said. Santorum told the story of how his grandfather had immigrated from Italy to work in Pennsylvania’s coal mines and how he had sacrificed to bring his family to America.
“That speech really resonates with Americans,” Schultz said. “I have heard him give it many times, but the way he sequenced the elements was brilliant.”

• A story on Rick Perry’s decision to stay in the race (an updated and expanded version of this post by Josh Hafner), which mentions Joe Allbaugh and Dave Carney among the crew of idiotic “strategists” responsible for running the doomstruck farce that is the Perry campaign. Evidently, Allbaugh and Carney didn’t get enough humiliation in Iowa to suit them, and are determined to utterly destroy any future political prospects for their client, the once widely-respected governor of Texas whom they’ve turned into a national laughingstock.

UPDATE IV: Linked by That Mr. G Guy — thanks! At the airport, I picked up a copy of the Boston Globe, the front-page headline of which is, “New dynamic for GOP as scene shifts to N.H.” And on the plane, I also read the New York Times, whose front-page story includes this interesting detail:

While Mr. Romney dominated the day-after-Iowa news coverage with his victory lap here, Mr. Santorum and his staff were slowly making the 1,400-mile journey from Des Moines in a King Air propeller plane that did not deliver them here until suppertime, too late to make a star turn on the evening news. He made a nighttime turn on Fox News and CNN and landed in time for a rally that drew hundreds

Santorum raised $1 million Wednesday, the same day I published my American Spectator column, “An All-American Miracle.” And Santorum has now jumped to 21% in the Rasmussen national poll.

Coincidence? I don’t think so.

Well, it’s now 2:30. We’ll have to hurry to make it to Concord in time for Santorum’s event, and Pete’s Buick LeSabre isn’t as fast as that sweet black Mustang. Sigh. I miss it already.