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Joe Ricketts, whose American Film Company produced The Conspirator, arrives at the film's premiere during the Toronto International Film Festival in 2010.

Alberto E. Rodriguez/Getty Images

Joe Ricketts, whose American Film Company produced The Conspirator, arrives at the film's premiere during the Toronto International Film Festival in 2010.

TD Ameritrade founder Joe Ricketts is the latest in a string of billionaires who have put their names and wallets on the line this election season.

The New York Times reported Thursday that Ricketts was considering spending $10 million on ads revisiting the controversy over President Obama's former pastor Jeremiah Wright.

By midday, Ricketts had backed away from that game plan, but earlier this week he paid for a big ad buy that helped propel a little-known Nebraska legislator to the Republican nomination for a U.S. Senate seat.

Ricketts has been a behind-the-scenes funder of conservative political causes for the past few years. He founded Taxpayers Against Earmarks, a group that railed against spending on pet projects by lawmakers in 2010.

In a Web video, he explained his political evolution: "I started my political life as a Kennedy Democrat, and Johnson pushed me out of the Democratic Party because he spent too much money. Reagan pulled me into the Republican Party, and Bush pushed me out because he spent too much money. So I am now a registered independent, and I probably will be that way for the rest of my life."

While the 70-year-old may be a registered independent, the vast majority of his political contributions have been to Republicans and against Democrats. He bankrolled an $862,000 campaign against Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, a Nevada Democrat, two years ago. He contributed to nearly all of the Republicans running for president this year.

The Ending Spending Action Fund, the successor to the anti-earmark group, spent more than a quarter of a million dollars on ads in support of Deb Fischer, the state lawmaker who won a surprising victory in Tuesday's Republican U.S. Senate primary in Nebraska.

Ricketts has also contributed at least $100,000 to the Friends of Scott Walker, the campaign for the Republican governor of Wisconsin now engaged in a bitter recall election.

Ricketts has appeared on Forbes magazine's list of the 400 wealthiest Americans, and he's believed to have a net worth of $1 billion. He amassed his wealth as the founder of TD Ameritrade, the online stock trading firm he started in 1975 as First Omaha Securities.

The Nebraska native recalled his first job, as a third-grader, helping the janitor of a local courthouse. The job, he said, made his parents proud. "And I felt proud of myself, cleaning bathrooms, emptying wastebaskets and sweeping floors because I had a job where I got paid. So that has always been the main focus of my life and my energies — to make money. And it's a lot of fun to make money."

In 2008, Ricketts stepped down as Ameritrade's chairman. He still holds about 15 percent of the company's stock. Aside from conservative politics, he's involved in a number of eclectic ventures, including an education foundation, a bison ranch and a film production company.

Three years ago, a family trust purchased the Chicago Cubs.

"I can tell you my kids are dedicated with every ounce of energy that they have to win a World Series," he has said.

And while that goal remains elusive, Ricketts is clearly hoping his efforts to shape the nation's politics will be more successful.

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Rev. Jeremiah Wright addresses the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., on April 28, 2008.

Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

Rev. Jeremiah Wright addresses the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., on April 28, 2008.

Battleground states like North Carolina are where the action is when it comes to presidential contests. Thus, they are where political tactics like, say, the anti-Obama ad campaign featuring Rev. Jeremiah Wright first reported by The New York Times Thursday (and now disowned by virtually everyone the Times linked to it) are most likely to be rolled out.

My colleague Liz Halloran talked with some politicos in the Tarheel State to hear what they thought of the proposed anti-Obama campaign. They included Democrat Gary Pearce who was an adviser to former Gov. Jim Hunt and Carter Wrenn, the man behind one of the most infamous Republican campaign ads in recent political history. His 1984 ad for the late long-time senator, Jesse Helms, showed a pair of white hands crumpling a job rejection letter as the narrator blamed minority hiring.

Liz writes:

The political world was aflutter (atwitter?) Thursday over a report in The New York Times that strategists affiliated with a Republican superPAC planned to resurrect as a campaign issue President Obama's past affiliation with the Rev. Jeremiah Wright.

The Times provided a view of the racially-tinged advertising campaign proposal, and said the strategists planned to launch the broadside during September's Democratic National Convention in North Carolina.

Updated @ 2:14 pm ET — Strategic Perception Inc., the ad firm whose principal, Fred Davis, was mentioned in a story about a proposed superPAC anti-Obama attack-ad campaign that would use Rev. Jeremiah Wright, has now issued a statement:

"The document referred to in today's New York Times story was one proposal prepared and submitted by Strategic Perception, Inc. The Ricketts family never approved it, and nothing has happened on it since the presentation. The vendors listed were as proposed, and had nothing to do with this proposal."

Updated @ 1:14 pm ET — Politico reports that billionaire conservative Joe Ricketts is seeking to distance himself from a proposed superPAC attack-ad campaign against President Obama that would have featured the president's old Chicago pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright.

Meanwhile, Mitt Romney told TownHall.com, the conservative web site, that he "repudiate(s)" the superPAC proposal.

"I repudiate the effort by that PAC to promote an ad strategy of the nature they've described. I would like to see this campaign focus on the economy, on getting people back to work, on seeing rising incomes and growing prosperity — particularly for those in the middle class of America. And I think what we've seen so far from the Obama campaign is a campaign of character assassination..."

- original post, with revisions, below -

Much attention is being paid Thursday to a New York Times story that a superPAC funded by Joe Ricketts, the conservative and superwealthy founder of brokerage TD Ameritrade and patriarch of the family that owns the Chicago Cubs, has proposed an ad campaign that would use — wait for it — Rev. Jeremiah Wright against President Obama.

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Sen. Dick Lugar, R-Ind., crosses the finish line of the 3-mile Capital Challenge charity race with Olympic marathoner Meb Keflezighi. It was Lugar's 31st race, and his last as a senator after he lost a primary challenge this month.

Javaun Moradi/NPR

Sen. Dick Lugar, R-Ind., crosses the finish line of the 3-mile Capital Challenge charity race with Olympic marathoner Meb Keflezighi. It was Lugar's 31st race, and his last as a senator after he lost a primary challenge this month.

The partisan divisions on Capitol Hill are numerous — but Wednesday morning, about two-dozen members of Congress did something entirely nonpartisan. They ran in a 3-mile race for charity, along with their staffs and teams from the executive and judicial branches and the media (including NPR).

The ACLI Capital Challenge is an annual tradition that dates back to 1981, and one senator has run the race every time: Dick Lugar, R-Ind. But Wednesday's race was also his last.

When the now 80-year-old Lugar first started running in the Capital Challenge, his goal was to be the fastest senator. That was 31 years ago.

"In more recent years, we've had more modest goals — like finishing the race," the six-term senator said with a chuckle a few minutes before the start.

Enlarge Pablo Martinez Monsivais/AP

President Obama's limo in what was, in part, the world's most impressive lunch run, Washington, May 16, 2012.

Pablo Martinez Monsivais/AP

President Obama's limo in what was, in part, the world's most impressive lunch run, Washington, May 16, 2012.

President Obama and congressional leaders lunched at the White House Wednesday on sandwiches the leader of the free world purchased during a visit to a Washington, D.C., eatery where he met earlier in the morning with a group of small-business people.

Descriptions of the White House lunch meeting from those on the opposing red and blue teams aware of the details of the discussion made it sound like yet another meeting featuring the nation's top policymakers that you could have accurately described beforehand.

The nation's top Democrats and Republicans essentially told the other side what they wouldn't compromise on as they ostensibly work to defuse the fiscal time bombs poised to explode at the end of the year — the debt ceiling, the Bush tax cuts and automatic and deep budget cuts due to take effect next year because of past failures to compromise.

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Massachusetts Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren is shown here attending a 2010 Capitol Hill hearing on the Troubled Asset Relief Program.

Alex Wong/Getty Images

Massachusetts Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren is shown here attending a 2010 Capitol Hill hearing on the Troubled Asset Relief Program.

Massachusetts Democratic Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren isn't backing down from her claim of Native American ancestry, despite the apparent lack of primary documents proving that she's 1/32nd Cherokee.

The controversy surrounding Warren's heritage led us to wonder — how much of a racial or ethnic heritage constitutes minority status? Should percentages of a bloodline matter at all?

The Census Bureau lets individuals self-identify. Since the 2000 count, people have been permitted to check multiple boxes for race or ethnicity. But history has shown a wide variance in how people of different backgrounds come to be identified as part of ethnic groups.

Notably, the issue of racial identity surfaced recently following the fatal shooting of Florida teenager Trayvon Martin, who was African-American. The boy's shooter, George Zimmerman, initially was identified as white, prompting accusations that he racially profiled Martin. Once it was reported that Zimmerman's mother is Latino and his father is white, he was identified as Hispanic and later as white Hispanic.

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The new political comedy team of Newark Mayor Cory Booker and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie yuck it up in January 2011.

Julio Cortez/AP

The new political comedy team of Newark Mayor Cory Booker and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie yuck it up in January 2011.

In our politically polarized age, we need to grab our moments of bipartisan bliss where we find them. Like in a comedic sketch by two New Jersey politicians with with soaring national reputations and who both are widely thought of as eventual White House prospects.

Gov. Chis Christie, the straight-talking former prosecutor widely assumed to be on all-but-official Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney's short-list of vice presidential candidate choices, and Newark Mayor Cory Booker, appear in a Seinfeldian skit ("Newman!") that spoofs the hero status the Democratic mayor achieved a few weeks back when he rescued a neighbor from a fire. For good measure, it also takes a poke at Christie's vice presidential potential.

Besides an ability to laugh at themselves, both Booker and Christie have shown a willingness to cross partisan lines, with Christie working with Democratic leaders in the state even as he has clashed with New Jersey's teachers' union, a key constituency of the state's Democratic party.

The Obama campaign on Wednesday escalated its attack on Mitt Romney's business career, with Vice President Joe Biden scheduled to aggressively question how Romney's management of Bain Capital might translate into running the U.S. economy.

On Monday, Obama's re-election campaign unveiled a new swing state ad questioning Romney's assertion that he was a job creator while running the private equity firm. The Romney campaign countered later in the day with its own ad.

On Tuesday, the Obama campaign's mantra was picked up by the pro-Obama superPAC Priorities USA Action, in what was officially (and by law) an uncoordinated ad — albeit, one with a very similar storyline.

And on Wednesday, Biden is scheduled to take the fight directly to Romney during a speech in Youngstown, Ohio.

"He thinks that because he spent his career as a 'businessman,' he has the experience to run the economy. So let's take a look at a couple of things he did," Biden is to say, according to excerpts released by the campaign.

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Nebraska state Sen. Deb Fischer applauds supporters at her election party Tuesday in Lincoln, Neb. At right is Fischer's mother, Florence Strobel.

Nati Harnik/AP

Nebraska state Sen. Deb Fischer applauds supporters at her election party Tuesday in Lincoln, Neb. At right is Fischer's mother, Florence Strobel.

Republican voters in Nebraska on Tuesday defied the expectations of pundits and the intentions of outside groups, nominating a heretofore little-known rancher and state lawmaker to run for the U.S. Senate seat being vacated by incumbent Democrat Ben Nelson.

Deb Fischer, 61, rode a last-minute surge in support to defeat the establishment-favored candidate, Nebraska Attorney General Jon Bruning. In the November general election, she will face a former governor and former senator — Bob Kerrey — who easily won the Democratic nomination.

Fischer had lagged behind Bruning and state Treasurer Don Stenberg in the polls and in fundraising for the race. But her candidacy caught fire going into the campaign's final days, after receiving an endorsement from Sarah Palin.

Fischer also benefited from a $200,000 ad buy last weekend from a superPAC led by Omaha businessman Joe Ricketts, the founder of TD Ameritrade and co-owner of the Chicago Cubs. The ad questioned Bruning's character and financial dealings.