Romney Would Not Require People Of Puerto Rico Cease Using Spanish

Romney Would Not Require People Of Puerto Rico Cease Using Spanish, Mitt Romney heads in to Illinois’s presidential primary this week with a handy win in Puerto Rico, pocketing the territory’s 20 GOP delegates in a bruising race that has become a numbers game for the Republican nomination.

With about 83% of total ballots accounted for early Monday in Puerto Rico, Romney had garnered more than 98,000 votes — or 83% of the total — based on unofficial results obtained from local party and election officials.

Rick Santorum was a distant second, at 8% with slightly more than 9,500 votes.

The other two candidates, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich and Texas Rep. Ron Paul, were barely registered in the race with 2,431 votes, or 2% of the vote, and 1,452 votes, or 1%, respectively.

Even as the vote was being counted in Puerto Rico, Romney, Santorum and the other candidates were already on the mainland vying for delegates in Illinois and Louisiana.

Illinois holds its primary on Tuesday and Louisiana on Saturday.

CNN’s latest delegate estimates show Romney with 518 delegates to Santorum’s 239. Gingrich has 139 delegates, and Paul, the libertarian champion, has 69 delegates. To secure the nomination, 1,144 delegates are needed.

Santorum, the former Pennsylvania senator, was in Louisiana late Sunday, where he is expected to win the primary.

Romney was in Illinois where polls indicate he holds a small lead over Santorum, with Gingrich and Paul well behind.

Puerto Rico Will Vote On Statehood In November

Puerto Rico Will Vote On Statehood In November, Puerto Rico’s Republican primary was nearly a week ago, but Rick Santorum was still talking about statehood for the territory at a campaign event on Saturday. At a gathering of conservatives in Camp Hill, Pa., on Saturday, he explained a question he received from a Puerto Rico newspaper when he visited the state earlier this month.

“I was asked the question, do you believe in statehood?” Santorum said. “I said sure, I have no problem with it. They said, what about the condition of having to speak the English language, because only 15% of Puerto Ricans speak English? And I said, well, of course they’d have to speak the English language.”

Santorum told the Spanish-language newspaper Vocero in mid March that “to be a state of the United States, English must be the principal language” of the territory.

Those remarks sparked backlash, including a rebuke from former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, who said at a campaign stop in the territory, “I don’t have preconditions that I would impose” should Puerto Ricans vote for statehood. The territory is set for a referendum on the issue in November.

But Santorum’s point for Pennsylvania voters wasn’t about statehood prospects for an island some 1,600 miles away. He used the incident to paint himself as principled, and Romney as inconsistent, or at worst, pandering.

Rick Santorum’s Wife

Rick Santorum’s Wife, Rick Santorum’s wife defended her husband’s stance on women’s issues, stating that it was “unfortunate” that the media has focused on the former Pennsylvania senator’s beliefs about contraception.

In an interview that aired Tuesday on “CBS This Morning”, Karen Santorum lamented the perception of her husband as a man who is out of touch with modern women.

“They try to corner him and make it look like he doesn’t know anything else,” she said of the focus on her husband’s socially conservative values. “As a wife, mother, an educated woman, it frustrates me that they try to do that.”

According to Santorum, the preoccupation with her husband’s take on issues like contraception and abortion has detracted from his other platforms.

“My husband is brilliant,” she said. “He knows so much about, like I said, national security, jobs, the economy. You know, every aspect of this race, any issue out there, he’s brilliant.”

Rick Santorum has come under fire in recent weeks for his stance on contraception, which he defended Sunday on Fox News.

“I’m reflecting the views of the church that I believe in,” he said in defense of the controversial Blunt amendment, which would have allowed employers to deny coverage of birth control for moral reasons. “We used to be tolerant of those beliefs. I guess now when you have beliefs that are consistent with the church, somehow, now you’re out of the mainstream, and that to me is a pretty sad situation when you can’t have personal held beliefs. But that’s not the issue — the issue is whether the government can force you to do things that are against your conscience, and that’s what we’ve been talking about on the road. We haven’t been talking about my own personal beliefs.”

As CBS points out, polls suggest that his stance on birth control has not sat well with female voters:

In Michigan, Santorum lost among women voters by five points, which helped give Mitt Romney his slim victory there. In Ohio, where Santorum and Romney are running neck-and-neck, polls show women voters are turning away from Santorum: An Ohio Quinnipiac poll released Monday shows that Romney leads Santorum 38 to 29 percent among women — even though Santorum led among women, 37 percent to 33 percent, in an Ohio Quinnipiac poll released just Friday.

New Madrid Fault

New Madrid Fault, A 4.0 earthquake within the New Madrid Seismic Zone gently shook southeast Missouri Tuesday morning at 3:58 a.m. The quake was centered about nine miles east of Sikeston, Missouri, and no damage or injuries were reported.

Just ten days ago, engineers, scientists, emergency first responders and earthquake history fans gathered at Saint Louis University for an event commemorating the two-hundredth anniversary of the mighty New Madrid Earthquake of 1811 and 1812.

That quake, estimated to be an eight on the Richter scale, wrought devastation throughout the New Madrid Zone of Missouri, Arkansas, Illinois, Indiana, Tennessee and Kentucky.

This is the quake that famously made the Mississippi River run backward — the Great East Japan Earthquake of 2010 was magnitude ten, by way of comparison.

CPAC Straw Poll

CPAC Straw Poll, Mitt Romney is back in the lead — at least symbolically — of the topsy-turvy Republican nomination race, going two for two on Saturday.

He won the influential Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) straw poll here Saturday with 38% support to Rick Santorum’s 31%, and he beat Ron Paul in Maine to cinch that state’s non-binding caucuses.

Romney won in Maine with 39% support to Paul’s 36%.

“I thank the voters of Maine for their support,” Romney said in a statement Saturday night. “I’m committed to turning around America, and I’m heartened to have the support of so many good people in this great state.”

Both wins are largely symbolic, though, as Maine’s 21 delegates will be divvied up in May.

Paul, who campaigned harder in Maine than any other candidate hoping for his first win in the GOP primary, told supporters Saturday night he thinks he’ll get the majority of Maine’s delegates eventually, and vowed to stay in the race.

“It would have been great to win outright the straw vote, but it will be even greater to win the delegate vote,” he said. “We’re not going to go away. We’re going to be in all these places where we’ll continue to pick up delegates for one good reason — we have the message that America needs at this particular time.”

In the CPAC straw poll, Newt Gingrich finished third with 15%, and libertarian-leaning Paul finished last with 12%.

Neither Santorum nor Gingrich campaigned in Maine, and finished with 18% and 6% respectively.

Four years ago, Romney won the CPAC straw poll, but bowed out of the race and endorsed John McCain.

He also won the Maine caucuses in 2008 with more than 50% support. But with just over 5,000 people voting in Maine Saturday, less than 200 votes separated Romney and Paul.

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