Yuval Levin argues that conservatives should start making the case for entitlement reforms now, even if reforms can’t be enacted in the short run.

Smashing Magazine offers up examples of stylish e-commerce designs. Of course, the visual design of an e-commerce site is properly secondary to its main purpose: sales.

New findings suggests that young people are rejecting traditional suburbia. If it’s true, market demand will drive more urban housing; planners need not interfere (via Beyond DC).

And last but not least, why the iPad can’t fully replace newspapers.

I recently presented at the Leadership Institute’s Online Fundraising Workshop. As I wrapped up, I offered a list of four sites I often visit to brush up on online marketing and fundraising best practices.

1. The Agitator. With its analysis of innovative fundraising techniques, marketing studies and psychology, The Agitator provides online fundraisers with excellent food for thought. Authors Tom Belford and Roger Craver frequently remind us, for example in their recent post on personalized e-mail communication, that online marketing follows the same principles as other marketing.
2. Copyblogger. Copyblogger provides excellent insight into how to write engaging and effective copy for the web, whether for e-mail, blog posts, landing pages or social media. The series on headline writing, for instance, helped redefine how I create copy for the web and for e-mail.
3. Media Post’s E-mail Insider. Geared more towards advanced users, E-mail Insider is nonetheless a must-read for those trying to raise funds online. Many posts are gems, like this best-practices checklist that both new and established e-mail program managers can return to again and again.
4. Connection Café. Written by consultants at non-profit software company Convio, Connection Café is geared to online fundraising novices and includes good posts on the basics, like a list of simple rules for e-mail composition.

America’s national debt recently crossed the $13 trillion mark, and taxpayers are on the hook for several times that amount as government spending on social programs rises uncontrollably.

Congress would do well to heed F.A. Hayek’s warning in The Constitution of Liberty: “[D]emocracy will have to learn that it must pay for its own follies and that it cannot draw unlimited checks on the future to solve its present problems.”

“States don’t have rights,” Stephen Green reminds us. “Individuals do. It’s time we went about the business of restoring those rights, without alienating a huge constituency which suffered too long without them.” Green rightly argues that conservatives’ use of the language of states’ rights is not only muddle-headed but, for historical reasons, tends to associate conservatives with Jim Crow.

Nicola Moore and Eric Heis are undertaking an innovative project to raise youth awareness of federal overspending: they’re making a video game caled U.O.Me. They’re accepting contributions through mid-August to fund the game’s programming.

Realizing that spending is an issue of growing salience, progressives are rallying around new gimmicks like advanced rescission to bolster their budget-cutter bonafides. George Will is having none of it: the plan “certainly would not reduce deficit spending: Under the president’s proposal, if Congress kills the projects on the president’s list, the budgetary allocation would not be reduced, so legislators could dream up new things on which to spend the money.”

Timothy Carney, for his part, wonders if conservatives will look to military budgets as a source of savings.

E.J. Dionne says it’s ironic that conservatives who decry big government are calling for the federal government to more effectively manage the Gulf oil spill. Dionne, of course, is missing the point: there’s a difference between effective government (or energetic government, as Publius dubbed it in the Federalist) and big government. But all too many conservatives allow progressives to make such arguments by advocating for *small *government rather than a *limited *government that undertakes only its core responsibilities.

And last but not least, this is a clever submission to Google’s Search Stories campaign:

Jonathan Adler argues that many self-described followers of Edmund Burke are anything but: “The institutions [David] Brooks would defend today bear no resemblance to the organic institutions Burke sought to protect.  Indeed, they have crowded out and, in some cases crushed, the little platoons upon which social order depends.  So the meaningful question for a true Burkean is not whether to oppose a Jacobin revolution, but what to do after such a revolution has already taken place.”

In the latest issue of A List Apart, Ethan Marcotte explains how to use CSS style sheets to create a web site that scales well to varying screen resolutions. For example, he uses CSS media queries to create a single page that renders well on an iPhone, on a standard monitor and on a wide-screen monitor. I’ve implemented some of his techniques on this page to make an iPhone-friendly version.

Europe’s “current welfare state is unaffordable…The crisis has made the day of reckoning closer by several years in virtually all the industrial countries.”

And last but not least, Google has made several excellent fonts available for free use on other sites through a simple CSS call. OFL Sorts Mill Goudy TT is now the default font for this site.