If the remedy to what happened in last year’s presidential election is to impeach the five Supreme Court justices who voted to stop the recounts,” says Ronnie Dugger, “then it would follow logically that you would impeach George W. Bush on the grounds that he is in receipt of stolen goods.” Yes, after all these years the 71-year-old former editor, publisher, and owner of the Texas Observer is still fighting the fight—denouncing the power of large corporations, calling for public funding of elections, and the like. Last year Dugger ran for the Green party’s nomination for U.S. senator in New York, which would have pitted him against Rick Lazio and Hillary Clinton. (He lost the primary by 79 votes, though the winner received only 439.) In January he moved from New York to Somerville, Massachusetts, a Boston suburb, and he works for the Alliance for Democracy, a grass-roots organization committed “to ending corporate domination.” And though he hasn’t lived in Austin since the early eighties, he maintains his official residency there and still sits on the Observer’s board of directors. Texas, it turns out, is never far from his thoughts. “I’d love to have the chance to talk to you about what’s happened to my beloved state,” he says. Is that so?>
