Larry is an intelligent, articulate, and insightful commentator whose views are shaped by a combination of journalism, entrepreneurship, law practice, and leadership.
✍ He is an experienced leader, having served as Chair of the LD18 Democrats, and President of the Democrats of Greater Tucson, a teacher at the UA Osher Lifelong Learning Institute, and Video Manager for Iskashitaa Refugee Network,
✍ A common-sense business leader, he operated a successful marketing consultancy for 20 years. He is skilled in fundraising, artificial intelligence, and online communications.
✍He considers multiple viewpoints before forming an opinion. His ethos is the Boy Scout Law.
✍ Larry is a lifelong writer, having worked as a seven-time award-winning journalist for the New York Daily News and as the author of 600 articles for the Blog for Arizona.
✍He is a graduate of Amherst College and Seton Hall Law School and has also attended the University of Munich in Germany.
✍He is not all work and no play. Larry enjoys singing and playing the guitar, hiking Tucson's beautiful trails, going on outings with his Portuguese Water Dog, weight training, and meeting his many friends for breakfast.
** Scroll down to see my articles below. **
Data Orbital’s ballot test for the Arizona Gubernatorial Race, between incumbent Republican Governor Doug Ducey and Democrat David Garcia, shows Ducey with just under an 8% lead. With only 7.9% of surveyed voters being undecided, there is little room for major movement leading up to election day.
“These numbers indicate that even with high enthusiasm from Democrats, Governor Ducey still holds a comfortable lead,” says George Khalaf, President of Data Orbital. Early ballots will be mailed out on October 10.
Print this out for future reference. Mail-in ballots will arrive on Oct. 10
Faced with a corrupt State Legislature and Supreme Court, Arizona voters will have the chance to fight back on 8 public initiatives.
Teachers, elected representatives, and a transportation official explained the merits of the ballot initiatives at the recent Tanque Verde Valley Democratic Club meeting.
Arrayed against voters are dark money interests and self-dealing corporations that are already spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to sabotage ballot initiatives to fund public schools, renewable energy, and clean elections.
“I said that this Legislature is owned by dirty money on the state House floor, and I was gaveled down,” says state Rep. Pamela Powers Hannley. “We still have corruption in the state government.”
Echoing these remarks, Luci Messing, the chair of the Tanque Verde Democrats, says, “We have a very corrupt majority in the Legislature who are not looking out for us. We need to take them out. That’s why it’s so important we vote for people who are pro-education, pro-family and will do best for Arizona and not for their pockets or personal gains. It’s definitely one of those issues where we can make a difference. The power is in our hands.”
“Arizona can’t afford fiscally irresponsible private school subsidies that siphon money away from its public education system,” says George Cunningham, chairman of the Grand Canyon Institute
According to a new policy paper, Arizona’s two private school subsidy programs cost the state $10,700 on average per regular education student who would not otherwise have enrolled in private school. This imposes an additional $62 million cost to the state’s General Fund.
Published by the non-partisan think tank the Grand Canyon Institute (GCI), the policy paper $10,700 Per Student: The Estimated Cost of Arizona’s Private School Subsidy Programs looks at how the state’s two private school subsidy programs — private school tuition tax credit scholarships and Empowerment Scholarship Account (ESA) vouchers — have affected private school enrollment and then estimated a per student cost to taxpayers.
In this 9/1/18 interview on the John C. Scott Show broadcast on KVOI 1030 AM, Blog for Arizona writer Larry Bodine reveals his insights about the August 28 Arizona primary races. Topics include: Who turned out to vote in the primary election? Was it Millennials and Latinos? Astonishingly, 100,000 people voted for a convicted racist crook. … Read more
LD9 state Senate candidate Victoria Steele with Pamela Powers Hannley, LD9 House representative.
Update: this was previously titled “Democrats Get to Pick their State Senator in Tucson’s LD9.”
After getting 22,590 votes in the Democratic primary for the LD9 state Senate race in Tucson, Victoria Steele has picked up a Republican write-in opponent.
Steele, a former member of the Arizona House of Representatives from 2012 to 2016, collected 82.2% of the votes in the primary.
Now a political nobody called Randy Fleenor has gotten 698 write-in votes (363 were needed) to be the Republican candidate the November ballot. Fleenor is an electrical engineer who works at IBM. He spouts the usual GOP tripe about not raising teacher salaries, expanding school vouchers and not raising taxes.
Even though Fleenor has never been elected to public office, he was put up for the job by Republican national committeeman Bruce Ash. There will be an official hand count audit & write-in ballot tally on Sept. 1.
