TD Ameritrade Founder Joe RickettsThis week, the New York Times reported that Joe Ricketts, a right-wing billionaire and founder of TD Ameritrade, is soliciting multi-million dollar ad proposals to attack President Obama. One such proposal, leaked to the paper, was a $10 million, racially-charged campaign entitled “The Defeat of Barack Hussein Obama: The Ricketts Plan to End his Spending for Good.” The proposal, which center on Rev. Jeremiah Wright, suggests hiring an “extremely literate conservative African-American” to break down Obama’s image as a “metrosexual, black Abe Lincoln.” Ricketts moved quickly to publicly reject the plan after it leaked. His spokesman said it “reflects an approach to politics that Mr. Ricketts rejects and it was … [Read more...]

The local press was quickly at the scene but Twitter broke the story first. Though the hour was late, Yemen’s social media was still very much awake. A US drone’s missiles had just slammed into a convoy of vehicles in a remote part of Yemen, killing three alleged militants. read more … [Read more...]

The box office smash The Avengers has officially made more than $1 billion worldwide, after setting the record for largest opening in film history. This revenue dwarfs the film’s $220 million budget, and makes one wonder why the state of New Mexico felt the need to subsidize the movie to the tune of $22 million: Marvel’s The Avengers has already raked in $1 billion worldwide, but News 13 has learned the state shelled out some serious cash to shoot the movie in New Mexico. According to the Taxation and Revenue Department, the state paid $22,413,469 in credits to Marvel Worldwide, Inc., the company that produced The Avengers. “This was spent on a movie production project that is now gone. It was here temporarily,” said New Mexico state Rep. Dennis Kintigh (R). … [Read more...]

Scene from the movie, "180"Students at a public Oklahoma high school were given copies of a movie that compares abortion to the Holocaust after a local family asked the principal if they could distribute the DVDs to students, according to a local TV station. The movie begins with images of Hitler and concentration camps before making a comparison between the Holocaust and abortion. The principal agreed to hand out the anti-abortion film, titled 180, if students obtained parental consent first, but the copies were handed out before parents were notified. One parent told Fox 23 heard about it from her stepdaughter: “She said that she had seen a DVD in school that basically said that if you have an abortion then you are no better than the Nazis and you will go to hell,” says … [Read more...]

As ThinkProgress has noted, Facebook’s initial public offering will help both CEO Mark Zuckerberg and the company itself avoid billions of dollars in taxes. With Facebook’s offering now in the books, as Bloomberg’s Paula Dwyer wrote, the company is set to … [Read more...]