You cannot get the state of an Item if all you have is its name. What you can do is pull the Item out of a Group by its name. See Design Pattern: Working with Groups in Rules.
I don’t think that storing Items in variables always works the way we expect. The problem is the Item becomes stale and may not reflect the changing state of the Item while the Rule isn’t running.
What exactly are you trying to accomplish with these variables? I’m all but certain there is a better approach.