Word: blackmailing
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...things: 1) underage greasers and rednecks will always be able to buy alcohol, and 2) the highway is where they'll drink it. In light of this, the government's connection of highway funds to raising the drinking age always seemed a little sinister to me. This federal blackmail, I figured, must be a plot to accelerate human roadkills--take away stationary place to drink, then provide more highway space on which to go drinking and driving. With natural selection fading out of vogue, the government must have thought this was the perfect way to rid our nation...
...military funding in October 1986, North proposed that the CIA purchase the Project Democracy assets, which he listed as including six aircraft, warehouses, ships, boats, houses and a 6,520-ft. airstrip in northern Costa Rica. The price tag: $4.5 million. North even seems to have engaged in near blackmail when officials in Costa Rica threatened to close this airstrip. After consulting with Elliott Abrams, the top State Department official on contra policy, and Lewis Tambs, U.S. Ambassador to Costa Rica, North reported that he called Costa Rican President Oscar Arias Sanchez to threaten that the U.S. would...
...deviate from an unbroken church practice of ordaining only men. Bishop Leonard has collected 18,000 signatures from conservative Anglicans, some of whom say they might follow him into an independent schismatic church if the Church of England approves female priests. Proponents of ordination for women call this stand "blackmail." Says Margaret Webster, executive secretary of the Movement for the Ordination of Women: "They made those threats before women were ordained in the American Episcopal Church, but few people actually left...
...Indeed, without ever mentioning that weapons sales had been involved, Reagan proclaimed defiantly, "Certainly it was not wrong to try to secure freedom for our citizens held in barbaric captivity." Six sentences later, with no apparent awareness of inconsistency, he pledged that the U.S. will never "yield to terrorist blackmail." It was not so much the lack of an "apology" that was disconcerting; it was the lack of any sense that he understood why a secret scheme to trade arms for hostages was a mistake, and one that he had made...
...revealing new light on King's human side and on the vicious secret pressures he faced from the FBI. The complex and convincing portrait drawn by David Garrow, associate professor of political science at New York's City College, describes how the bureau under J. Edgar Hoover tried to blackmail and intimidate King with tapes of his sexual encounters and how it attempted to discredit him by spreading reports about his love life after he refused to break off his friendship with a suspected Communist agent...