慢速JSON请求

I'm creating a application for IOS with the phonegap environment. I'm noticing on one of my pages that scrolling seems to be REALLY slow and choppy. I've tried the following:

Reducing the amount of data being pulled. I took it down to just pulling in the images. However, it still seemed to run really sluggish even after the images loaded.
Not resizing the images
Using a lazy scroll option
Tried skipping the json portion of my code and hard coding the images and it ran perfectly at that point

I need to dynamically load this information so that I can keep my app up to date. Here are my questions:

Does the JSON request stay open at all times and is that what is causing the slow down? Is there a way to close the request.
Is there a reason that my app is getting bogged down that I'm not seeing?

Would love your thoughts, here is my code: https://gist.github.com/2422231

jquery - 1.7.1 jquerymobile - 1.1.0

The json wasn't the problem but rather there is bug in JqueryMobile that causes choppy display when you scroll a list of links. Here you go:

https://forum.jquery.com/topic/why-jqm-touchscreen-list-scrolling-performance-stinks-and-what-to-do-about-it