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A brief groundbreaking ceremony will include a performance by USI alumni (and spouses) Kensington Blaylock Eck ’08 and Brandon Eck ’10, followed by remarks from Dr. Linda L. M. Bennett, president, Ted C. Ziemer Jr., chair of the USI Board of Trustees, and Elliot Wasserman, chair of Performing Arts and director of Theatre. The ceremony will be held at the future site of the theatre, next to University Center East on University Boulevard.

After the ceremony, a reception will be held in the newly renovated Loft on the second level of University Center West. USI alumni and friends are welcome to attend.

The Teaching Theatre will be constructed using locally-sourced and recycled materials such as those utilized in the construction of University Center East – clay pipe from Can Clay Corporation of Cannelton, chair legs from Jasper Chair Company, and Bedford limestone. In addition, the theatre will include a sound baffle system with acoustic panels created with Toyota Sienna dashboards donated by Princeton-based Toyota Motor Manufacturing, Inc.

The Teaching Theatre’s red sandstone exterior is an homage to the Smithsonian Institution’s Castle. Built in 1855, it is the oldest building on the National Mall. Congressman Robert Dale Owen (son of Robert Owen, founder of the second utopian experiment at New Harmony) was chair of the Smithsonian Building Committee. His brother, geologist David Dale Owen, recommended it be built from red sandstone. Both Owens resided in New Harmony for a time, and USI is one of the sponsors of Historic New Harmony, an initiative to create and retain interest in the history and current life of the village.

Like UC East, the Teaching Theatre was designed by Holzman Moss Bottino Architecture of New York. It will have a thrust stage with additional staging areas incorporated into the walls, a shallow proscenium to allow for greater sightlines, exceptional natural acoustics, and state-of-the-art light and sound technology.

“We will become the premiere theatre program in the state and region,” Wasserman said. “We already have the programs and now we’ll have the facilities to match.”

The general contractor is Empire Construction, mechanical contractor Deig Brothers Construction, and electrical contractor Alva Electric with mechanical, electrical, and plumbing engineering by Hafer Associates. Estimates are that more than 100 construction jobs will result from the two-year project.

The Teaching Theatre is scheduled for completion in the fall of 2014. Plans are also in the works for a theatre support building with costume and set shops.

The last USI groundbreaking was for University Center East in spring 2009.

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The two tracking polls with the best results for predicting presidential contests now have two days of data after the selection of Paul Ryan as the running mate for Mitt Romney in their calculation and neither poll has shown an significant change due to this choice. The Rasmussen Tracking poll today shows Romney with a 47% – 44% lead over President Obama while Gallup’s Tracking poll shows the contest tied at 46% each.

The average of these two polls is now showing the Romney/Ryan campaign with 46.5% and the Obama/Biden at 45% statistically unchanged from last Friday before the announcement of Ryan as Romney’s running mate. The average approval rate for President Obama is now negative 5.5% meaning that 5.5% more of those polled disapprove of the Presidents job performance. The average approval rating for the President was 45% and the average disapproval was 50.5%.

In the matter of Mitt Romney’s selection of Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis., to be his running mate, I keep flashing on images of Wallace Shawn in “The Princess Bride”: Inconceivable!

Here’s a rule of thumb: If you are the Republican nominee and The Wall Street Journal editorial page, The Weekly Standard and National Review are all urging you to do the same thing, run the other way. Romney doesn’t need the base; if they are not enthusiastically for him, they are enthusiastically against Obama, which ought to be enough.

Romney needs independents in Virginia, suburban women in Colorado, seniors in Florida. It’s not a question of whether Ryan will help him woo these voters; it’s a matter of whether Ryan — especially once the Obama campaign and associated super PACs get through with him — will make that even harder.

On the plus side, Ryan is smart, engaging, charismatic, young. He’s got good chemistry with Romney. He’s serious and committed without being off-putting or intractably partisan. Democrats who’ve worked with Ryan like and respect him.

But selecting him as the veep candidate doesn’t make sense. It undercuts several aspects of the Romney narrative.

Romney is the outside Washington candidate — now running with a sitting member of a body with a 12 percent approval rating. He’s the private sector fix-it guy-now with a career politician.

Most important, the choice of Ryan pushes against what has been the central theory of Romney’s campaign: Make it less of a choice between himself and Obama and more of a referendum on the incumbent president and the languishing economy.

Instead, substitute endless debate and wall-to-wall advertising on every last detail of every plan Ryan has ever put out: to add private accounts to Social Security, to change Medicare into a voucher program, to slash domestic spending to unimaginably bare-bones levels.

Why would Romney take on a fight that President Obama has been itching to have? Here was Obama in April, running against what then seemed his pipe dream ticket of Romney-Ryan: “The Republicans running Congress right now have doubled down, and proposed a budget so far to the right it makes the Contract With America look like the New Deal. In fact, that renowned liberal, Newt Gingrich, first called the original version of the budget ‘radical’ and said it would contribute to ‘right-wing social engineering.’ … This is now the party’s governing platform.

“This is what they’re running on. One of my potential opponents, Gov. Romney, has said that he hoped a similar version of this plan from last year would be introduced as a bill on day one of his presidency. He said that he’s ‘very supportive’ of this new budget, and he even called it ‘marvelous’ — which is a word you don’t often hear when it comes to describing a budget.”

This is the fall conversation that Romney wants to enable?

I don’t get it. The argument for going bold, shifting gears, throwing long balls — insert cliché here — would be if the Romney campaign has concluded that it has lost the campaign-as-referendum-on-Obama argument and is panicking. But a spate of problematic national and swing stage polls notwithstanding, that seems way, way premature to me. It seems way, way premature to many Democratic strategists I’ve spoken to since the announcement.

The Ryan choice means I get to wallow in Congressional Budget Office analyses and Tax Policy Center distributional tables. It should make for a more interesting and more substantive campaign — one that may better prepare the country for the difficult fiscal choices facing the next president. I just don’t see how it helps Mitt Romney secure that job.

Source: R. Marcus