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rhib.bsky.social
Rhi B 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿
@rhib.bsky.social
380 followers 210 following 940 posts
Welsh. Mum & Nain. She/her.
Retired criminology lecturer/researcher. Bookworm.
Here mainly to indulge a lifelong fascination with US politics.
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rhib.bsky.social
Newsom’s press office once again delivering the goods 😂
December 2, 2025 at 11:28 PM
rhib.bsky.social
Album cover - Bob Dylan, “Blood on the Tracks”
November 29, 2025 at 11:55 PM
rhib.bsky.social
May she rest in power.

This 👇 book is a thorough - and often distressing - account of the massacre. Recommended for anyone wishing to understand what happened, and why.
In fact, it should probably be compulsory reading for everyone, everywhere.
Cover of Tim Madigan’s book “The Burning”
November 25, 2025 at 12:18 AM
rhib.bsky.social
This 👇 book is a thorough - and often distressing - account of the massacre. Recommended for anyone wishing to understand what happened, and why.
In fact, it should probably be compulsory reading for everyone everywhere.
The cover of Tim Madigan’s book “The Burning”
November 24, 2025 at 11:22 PM
rhib.bsky.social
This 👇 book is a thorough - and often distressing - account of the massacre. Recommended for anyone wishing to understand what happened, and why.
In fact, it should probably be compulsory reading for everyone everywhere.
Cover of “The Burning” by Tim Madigan
November 24, 2025 at 11:17 PM
rhib.bsky.social
The discovery that a significant number of political accounts – especially in the pro-Trump/MAGA sphere – are operated from abroad carries far-reaching implications. It validates warnings that covert foreign influence on social media did not end with 2016, but is an ongoing challenge to U.S. democracy and societal cohesion.
November 24, 2025 at 11:27 AM
rhib.bsky.social
22nd November 1963 JFK's assassination in Dallas.

This was the first story I tried to read in a UK broadsheet (aged almost 7), and my poor Dad had to field countless difficult-to-answer questions.
It's the origin of my enduring fascination with US politics.
#JFK
JFK and Jackie Kennedy in open-topped car in Dallas, 22.11.63
November 22, 2025 at 9:04 AM
rhib.bsky.social
"Hammering" being the operative word here.
The political moral is that the humiliating cave over the shutdown isn’t the end of the story. Democrats can and should keep hammering Trump and his party over their indifference to the suffering of ordinary Americans. They need to make sure both that Americans know who’s responsible for surging premiums now and that Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill will lead to savage cuts in both Medicaid and food stamps after the midterms. MAGA can’t help being cruel. It can’t even pretend to care about other people’s suffering. And Democrats should take full advantage of this pathology.
November 12, 2025 at 11:51 AM
rhib.bsky.social
🎯 From @coldwarsteve.bsky.social & The Guardian
November 2, 2025 at 11:43 AM
rhib.bsky.social
Reading @davidcorn.bsky.social’s “My Coffee With Steven Miller” and enjoyed not just the article but also the on-point ad placement it included (twice!) 😂
Ad featuring photo of balding male, with text: “Top doctor: hair transplant? Do this instead to regrow hair”
October 20, 2025 at 10:06 PM
rhib.bsky.social
Album cover - Ella & Louis: the very best of Ella Fitzgerald & Louis Armstrong
October 11, 2025 at 10:36 PM
rhib.bsky.social
I'm sure he'll particularly love the highlighted line in the screenshot below...

Perhaps next year they'll award it to the frogs of Portland 👍😏
María Corina Machado win Nobel peace peace Venezuela’s most influential opposition leader receives the award. Some more on this year’s winner from the Committee: In the past year, Miss Machado has been forced to live in hiding. Despite serious threats against her life, she has remained in the country, a choice that has inspired millions. When authoritarians seize power, it is crucial to recognise courageous defenders of freedom who rise and resist.”
October 10, 2025 at 11:02 AM
rhib.bsky.social
Let this be a message to Trump that he won't be seeing a Nobel any time soon.
María Corina Machado win Nobel peace peace Venezuela’s most influential opposition leader receives the award. Some more on this year’s winner from the Committee: In the past year, Miss Machado has been forced to live in hiding. Despite serious threats against her life, she has remained in the country, a choice that has inspired millions. When authoritarians seize power, it is crucial to recognise courageous defenders of freedom who rise and resist.”
October 10, 2025 at 9:25 AM
rhib.bsky.social
Poster for the 1964 movie “A Hard Day’s Night” starring the Beatles
September 28, 2025 at 11:00 PM
rhib.bsky.social
And what he saw was "a TV report that featured video of a 2020 protest wrongly described as having taken place this summer."

WTAF?
www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...
“I will say this, I watched today, I didn’t know that was continuing to go on, but Portland is unbelievable, what’s going on,” Trump said. He then claimed, incorrectly, that he had seen video evidence of “the destruction of the city”. In fact, a handful of protesters have demonstrated outside an Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in a residential area of Portland along the south waterfront this year, but the scale of the protests, which attract dozens at most, is nothing like the 2020 protests following the police killing of George Floyd that regularly drew thousands to tens of thousands of demonstrators to a central part of the city for months.
September 27, 2025 at 4:55 PM
rhib.bsky.social
David Bowie - "Hunky Dory" album cover
September 25, 2025 at 5:32 PM
rhib.bsky.social
Still have my vinyl copy. They were the first band I saw live.
My ticket for the T . Rex gig in Cardiff, October 1971.
September 24, 2025 at 10:59 PM
rhib.bsky.social
Yaxley-Lennnon manages to get himself deported from Panama *and* Colombia within 24 hours. 😏
September 20, 2025 at 2:51 PM
rhib.bsky.social
Welcome to the UK, Donald 😏
👀
www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...
“Donald J Trump loves making history,” said Ian Katz, Channel 4’s chief content officer. “So, on Wednesday Channel 4 will do just that: we’ll show what we believe to be the longest uninterrupted reel of untruths, falsehoods and distortions ever broadcast on television. “We hope it will remind viewers how disorientating and dangerous the world becomes when the most powerful man on Earth shows little regard for the truth. And if President Trump cares to watch along after the state banquet, he may even clear up a few misconceptions.”
September 16, 2025 at 9:03 AM
rhib.bsky.social
Kirk "understood that a culture war inherently favours those willing to disregard the rules. It is a lesson that liberals and the left are, rightly, reluctant to learn – but that reluctance comes at an increasingly high price."
From @jonathanfreedland.bsky.social
www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...
Put aside the inaccuracy of such a statement. Put aside the documented fact that not some, but all extremist-related killings in the US in 2024 were connected to rightwing extremism, just as they were in 2023 and in 2022. Put aside that, although Trump listed incidents in which figures associated with the right had been attacked, he pointedly did not mention and wilfully chose to ignore the murder of the Democratic Minnesota lawmaker Melissa Hortman and her husband in June; or the arson attack on the home of the Democratic governor of Pennsylvania, Josh Shapiro, in April; or an earlier plot to kidnap the Democratic governor of Michigan. Put it all aside, even though it exposes the transparent falsity of Trump’s declaration that US political violence comes from one side only. Consider instead the likely effect of his words. At best, they add fuel to an already incendiary situation. At worst, they encourage retaliation and revenge. How should they – Democrats, liberals, the left – be responding to this moment of peril? So far they have observed the old norms, with almost every Democratic figure of any standing, whether former president or serving politician, offering the decent, human response: horror at such a brutal act, sympathy for Kirk’s wife and now-fatherless young children, fear for where this leaves the country. Watch MSNBC, or listen to the Pod Save crowd, and you’ll see that that’s how most of the leading lights in the anti-Trump universe have, rightly, responded. Any deviation from that norm has been punished. It is one of the asymmetries of the US culture wars that this etiquette, rigorously enforced from left to right, is not observed in the other direction. So when an intruder broke into the home of the former House speaker Nancy Pelosi, and nearly clubbed her husband, Paul, then 82, to death, the leading Republican in the country did not offer condemnation or words of consolation. No, Trump responded by making repeated jokes at Paul Pelosi’s expense. Different rules apply. After an act of violence, Democrats must be gracious, empathetic and call for calm on all sides, while Republicans can mock the victims, blame only one side and demand more violence. And there’s a further asymmetry: a single post from a random, anonymous user online will be treated as a statement from “the left”, while the outpourings of the right’s most powerful voices, in politics or the media, and including the president himself, somehow get a free pass. As part of this etiquette, it’s become poor taste to point out Kirk’s actual views. It’s as if the belief that no one should be killed for their opinions requires you to withhold any judgment of those opinions. But Kirk did not hold back. He was happy to tell people that he would be nervous getting on a plane flown by a Black pilot, and to talk of “prowling Blacks”; to tell Taylor Swift to “Reject feminism. Submit to your husband … You’re not in charge”; to deny the truth of the 2020 election; to recommend that children should watch public executions; and to suggest “Jewish dollars” were to blame for the spread of “cultural Marxism”.
September 13, 2025 at 10:38 AM
rhib.bsky.social
18 years ago I was diagnosed with an MPN (ET) after a blood test for a completely unrelated health matter.
You can find out more about these rare blood cancers at www.mpnvoice.org.uk/about-mpns/q...
#MPNAwarenessDay
September 11, 2025 at 9:55 AM
rhib.bsky.social
"Flags, is it?" 😂 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿

Pontllanfraith, South Wales.
A line of international flags affixed to a bridge in Pontllanfraith, South Wales; at its centre is a banner saying "Flags, is it?"
September 11, 2025 at 9:41 AM
rhib.bsky.social
It is potentially a very dangerous moment in America.

www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...
Kirk's killing is both another episode of shocking gun violence in America – and the latest in an ever-lengthening line of recent political violence. Earlier this year two Democratic state legislators in Minnesota were shot in their homes – with one dying from her wounds. Last year, Donald Trump was twice the target of assassination attempts. His brush with a bullet at an outdoor rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, bears striking similarities to Wednesday's shooting in Utah – both playing out before gathered crowds at outdoor venues. Two years before that, a hammer-wielding assailant broke in to the home of then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, a prominent Democrat. In 2017, a man opened fire on Republican congressmen practicing on a northern Virginia baseball field. It is difficult to divine where American politics goes from here, but the trajectory is bleak. Violence begets violence. Increasingly divisive rhetoric, fuelled by social media echo chambers and easy access to firearms, leads to raw nerves and a heightened potential for bloodshed.
September 11, 2025 at 7:58 AM
rhib.bsky.social
Exactly the way you'd expect a man who's dismissive of domestic violence to speak to a woman 🤨
Reporter: Are you ready to go to War with Chicago? Trump: When you say that, darling, that's fake news. Be quiet. You don't listen. That's why you're second rate. We're not going to war...
September 8, 2025 at 5:29 PM
rhib.bsky.social
My ticket for T. Rex in Cardiff, October 1971 - my first concert.
September 3, 2025 at 5:45 PM