While in Florida momentum has quickly shifted away from Newt Gingrich and to Mitt Romney, on the national level Gingrich is still going very strong. Two national polls out today both give Gingrich a solid nine point lead over Romney.

But then I see articles across the Toobz like this from Tuesday from US News (via Yahoo) with the headline “Are We Entering a Jobless Recovery?” and I just want to weep at the incredible combination of stoopid and duplicity to that gives us such a headline.

Dylan Ratigan is well positioned to author a book, designed to be an enjoyable and informative read by normal humans, on the ongoing financial crisis. He is the wunderkind who became Global Managing Editor for Corporate Finance of Bloomberg, the premier news service that specializes in finance, at an exceptionally young age. He was at CNBC while that network was hyping the housing bubble as a non-bubble offering fantastic investment opportunities.

OK, so you might have noticed a few headlines the last few days talking about how the economy is getting better, unemployment is dropping, and we’re all going to win Powerball tonight and retire tomorrow with our sparkly ponies.

If you read me often enough, you have probably noticed that I tend to check various news and opinion sites throughout the TradMed each morning, after I’ve spent a few minutes reviewing emails and jobs sites. Most of the time, I just shake my head at the various levels of stupidity I find, not being able to quite give it the full YOU HAVE GOT TO BE F*CKING KIDDING ME! treatment so richly deserved. Then there are days like today where teh stoopid is so truly dumbfounding.

Jobs.

Although the official time frame for “The Great Recession” was December 2007 through June 2009, for the millions of long term un and underemployed, the daily reality is that not only has the recession never ended, it is more applicable to The Great Depression than it is to any of the various acknowledged recessions since the end of WWII. One of the articles of faith from the always surprised Economists is that job creation lags other indicators, yet here we are, over two years since the “end” of the last recession and the official unemployment rate is still at 9.1% with the underemployed figure at 16.2% for August 2011.

Ratigan’s rant did not pander to his audience with cheap talking points that reinforce tribalist divisions — as well as the status quo. Instead he made everyone profoundly agitated by speaking the hard truths that throw the whole game board up in the air and scatter the playing pieces on the ground.

It takes money to run and win political office. Regular people can not afford to set up secret dummy corporations to funnel millions into efforts help politicians. On the other hand a single rich person can. This is exactly why politicians spend so much time trying to make a relatively few rich happy.

I have, and always have had, tremendous respect for Cenk Uygur. His contract with his audience is that he will never put himself in a position where he cannot say what he really thinks. And in turning down MSNBC’s offer to host a weekend show so he could give his audience a fair appraisal of what happened, he honors that contract.

The saddest part of Jane Hamsher’s interview on Ed’s show last night was listening to Ed groan in the background as Ms. Hamsher calmly explained that it was his supposedly Democratic President who was insisting on putting Social Security and Medicare at risk as a condition for avoiding a default on the national debt. How could this be?