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it s the top of the hour on cnn newsroom. i m pamela brown, and we begin the hour with a travel nightmare. thousands of flights have been canceled or delayed across the country today. the hardest hit, southwest airlines, which has scrapped more than 60% of its flights. take a look here. these are some of the long lines of southwest passengers in raleigh, atlanta, and denver airports. in a statement to cnn, southwest airlines said it is, quote, experiencing disruptions across our network as a result of the winter storm s lingering effects on the totality of our operations. carlos suarez is on the southwest side of the terminal. what are you seeing? what are you hearing from passengers? reporter: well, pamela, i m hearing a great deal of frustration from a good number of passengers who are stranded, and are flying southwest airlines or at least they were hoping to today. the airport here in atlanta has seen well over 200 canceled flights and a majority of those flight ....
Flights across the u.s., well, you can imagine that number at this hour is in the thousands, with thousands more flights being delayed. now we caught up with one passenger who made this line here for this southwest airlines flight. she had some pretty harsh words for that airline, and here s what she told us. i have lots of thoughts, maybe not camera-appropriate. we have been standing in line for hours. canceled flight yesterday. i feel like we have been led on, you know, so we know there s staffing issues from storm elliott. we get that, the ripple effect, but then when you are trying to rebook, right, when you call the line that they asked you to call, it hangs up on you. you call again, it has a dial tone like the number doesn t exist, and then you call again and you get through, and you re on the hold for three or four hours. i did that last night, this morning. this is it s just ridiculous. reporter: and you can kind of tell just how long these passengers have been in line. ....
Least what we saw in north carolina. they re sort of like drivebyes or fly byes in the way these are happening quickly, and these places aren t protecte as we ma want it to be. there s a lot of noise about doing this. there s not one person saying, we re going to go after these facilities. this is now part of a concerted effort on, in particular, right wing extremist groups to look or go after critical infrastructure. i m looking at the data from the tacoma area. you don t have four incidents like that happening randomly or coincidentally. this is clearly a concerted effort, and on christmas day when there would be the least amount of help possible as we know is certainly look like a targeted attack. right. so just quickly though, i mean, given the national security implications here, how can it be that it could just be a drive-by, fly-by situation as ....
no. that will whittle it down an awful lot, hopefully down to within usually right around that last known position. air france 447 was only about nine miles from the last known position. so that s probably where to focus the effort on. and i ll say one thing about the pingers. they need quiet when they re listening for that pinging. and one of my worries is there are so many ships out there. if you remember with the malaysian air situation, if in some cases, they thought they were hearing the ship they were on and it was nearby ships. david, let me stay with you for one second. how confident are you that investigators will find the black boxes fairly quickly? absolutely positive they ll find the black boxes, fairly quickly, relative term. but i m expecting a few days to a week. depending on the weather conditions out there. but they ve got the right ....
Looking for something besides mitt romney. even here in new hampshire where perhaps he s strongest, where he vacations, where he s spent years and years building an organization, i think you can see a real jump from one of those guys. i wanted to put on you the stand here to talk about santorum, then, in terms of who s the one who may jump. he s getting the closer look after iowa. a lot has been written about his socially conservative views. but also a fair amount to unearth about his record in washington. you took a close look at santorum in an extensive article back in 2003. what do you think people might be surprised to find out about him? well, you know, he s kind of on the trail right now, the working class guy from pennsylvania. he s like you and me. he s not a rich guy, he says. has values like you. but, in fact, he was part of this effort on in congress back in the 90s and 2000s essentially to try and take control of k street, lobbying corridor. he was very involved in t ....