Texas officials have tentatively agreed to pay $99,000 to settle a lawsuit filed by environmentalists who were arrested for peacefully protesting on the sidewalk in front of the governor’s mansion, the residence of George W. Bush. The enviros, who were calling on Bush to push for a measure requiring old polluting industrial plants to clean up their emissions (Bush didn’t oblige), were arrested four times in the spring of last year. The suit alleged that Bush and the state Department of Public Safety violated the protestors’ free speech rights. In another environmental embarrassment for the GOP presidential candidate, word is out that an oil company for which Bush served as a director and a consultant between 1986 and 1992 was slow and in some cases negligent during those years in cleaning up pollution from leaky gasoline tanks that were contaminating water supplies and the ocean in Florida.
