Grand Vizier Cheney

(Newser) - Vice President Dick Cheney and Democratic White House hopeful Barack Obama have an unlikely bond. They are eighth cousins, according to Cheney's wife, Lynne. She discovered the two share a common 17th Century ancestor in French Huguenot Mareen Duvall, whose son married the granddaughter of a Richard Cheney in Maryland in the 1650s, she told MSNBC. More »

(Newser) - Dick Cheney considered encouraging Israel to launch an air strike on Iran, Reuters reports,  citing a Newsweek claim that Cheney saw the strike as drawing retailation that would, in turn, draw the US into a war. Cheney adviser David Wurmser is said to have disclosed the discussions. More »

(Newser) - Vice President Dick Cheney will resist efforts by Congress to force him to produce dozens of documents relating to a warrantless wiretapping program conducted by the National Security Agency, the Washington Post reports. Cheney's counsel acknowledged for the first time yesterday that the vice president's office has documents relating to the controversial program.     More »

(Newser) - Dick Cheney admitted yesterday that he was wrong when he said the Iraqi insurgency was "in its last throes" in 2005. "My estimate at the time was wrong, it turned out to be incorrect," the VP told CNN's Larry King. He said he had been optimistic that elections and a constitution would "undermine the insurgency," but "that clearly didn't happen." More »

(Newser) - Doctors have replaced Dick Cheney's defibrillator "without complication," a spokeswoman for the VP says. A checkup last month revealed that the battery in the 6-year-old cardiac implant was running low, and yesterday doctors performed a routine procedure to swap out the power source without affecting the wires that connect to the heart, the AP reports. More »

(Newser) - Dick Cheney makes jokes about his own penchant for secrecy in a new biography due out tomorrow by journalist Stephen Hayes, Raw Story reports. The veep makes a rare admission of error, confessing to Hayes that the appointment of the Coalition Provisional Authority in the early stages of the war, rather than a provisional government of Iraqis, might have been a mistake. More »

(Newser) - President Bush will undergo a routine colon exam tomorrow, leaving Dick Cheney in the driver's seat for roughly 2½ hours while he's under anesthesia. Bush's personal physician will supervise the procedure, in the medical facility at Camp David. This will be the second time the VP has acted as president; the first was during Bush's last colonoscopy, in 2002. More »

(Newser) - A judge today dismissed outed CIA operative Valerie Plame's civil suit against Dick Cheney, Karl Rove, and Scooter Libby, saying that the revelation of her identity "was incidental to the kind of conduct that defendants were employed to perform." Furthermore, the judge ruled, Plame and her husband, ex-ambassador Joseph Wilson, failed to show that the case belongs in federal court. More »

(Newser) - Dick Cheney is winning a West Wing power struggle, pushing the president toward the threat of military action against Iran, the Guardian reports. After an internal review over the last month, Condoleezza Rice and Robert Gates favor continued diplomacy, but are said to be losing the argument. "Bush is not going to leave office with Iran in limbo," a Washington source tells the paper. More »

(Newser) - A coalition of Democratic and Green Party clubs opened a storefront office in Los Angeles yesterday, as part of a seemingly Quixotic campaign to remove the President and Vice President from office. Some 300 people heard speakers at a nearby rally cite the Iraq war, spying on citizens, and torture tactics used against terrorist suspects as justification for the effort, the Los Angeles Times reports.   More »

(Newser) - MSNBC's Keith Olbermann came out swinging last night, demanding the resignation of both the president and VP—"two men who are now perilous to our democracy." Drawing on both John Wayne and James Madison, the anchor donned his commentator hat to contend that commuting Scooter Libby's sentence was the final straw in a string of baldly partisan actions. More »

(Newser) - GOP decision-makers are so fed up with Dick Cheney that they've been searching for a replacement, without much success—until recently. In an op-ed in today's Washington Post, inveterate insider Sally Quinn lays out an ingenious plan: Use heart surgery scheduled for this summer as an excuse to oust the VP, and install Fred Thompson in his place. More »