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"Randy flat out said, 'We can't give you the time,'" [Palin spokesman Tim] Crawford said. "I very much enjoyed my time working with Governor Palin and wish her and her family all the best," Scheunemann said in an email. "If she decides to run for any office again, she will be a formidable candidate." Regular readers will remember that Scheunemann, while working for Palin, also lobbied for one of George Soros' groups, the Open Society Policy Center. After I reported that connection, Palin took a bit of flack on the right for her (admittedly tenuous) link to the liberal billionaire. But is it accurate that Scheunemann simply doesn't have the time to work for Palin? It's impossible to know his schedule, of course (I have asked Orion's Michael Goldfarb and I will update this post if I hear back). Orion Strategies does appear to have recently picked up a new client -- meaning it is now registered to lobby for a total of three entities. One is Soros' group. Another is the National Shooting Sports Foundation, the trade association for the gun industry. The new client is an entity called the Corbiere Trust Company Limited. It is based on the English Channel island of Guernsey, which is a British crown dependency and tax haven. Corbiere is associated with the ex-oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who is currently in prison after being convicted of fraud in a controversial (and allegedly politically motivated) case in Russia last year. Orion lobbies on "rule of law and human rights in Russia" for Corbiere, according to disclosure forms. Corbiere's own act Now, sensible people may ask, is it really necessary to use taxpayer or foundation dollars to subsidize the creation of content on the World Wide Web -- ostensibly the cheapest and most democratic publishing platform ever devised by humankind? The fact that the Web Development Fund's first round of funding drew more than 500 proposals, says Weiss, is evidence that a certain type of content is no longer being commercially subsidized on the Web. In any case, he says, producers are not getting rich off Web Lab. Most of the budgets of the funded projects, which can receive grants of up to $50,000 each, include substantial amounts of in-kind donations and free labor. And Weiss says Web Lab is a necessary counter to the trend toward Web portals -- which, by mimicking the notion of a TV channel or broadcast network, make it harder and harder to find the scrappy sites that don't have beachfront real estate or six-figure marketing budgets. "It is easy to imagine a year from now people having very narrow portals to the Web," says Weiss. "Disney is going to put themselves at the entryway." Perhaps the best argument for Web Lab, however, is to be found in the content itself. Now that its first two projects have been launched, it's a good time to see if Web Lab is living up to its goals. The funding guidelines say that Web Lab is seeking to fund sites that "demonstrate the potential of the World Wide Web as a social, democratic medium capable of catalyzing new perspectives, new thinking and new relationships between people." Working Stiff, the Lab's aptly titled maiden project, is a Web zine for working-class folks -- a Dilbert for the downsized and disfranchised. Interlacing hand-scrawled graffitiesque graphics with gritty content, Working Stiff delivers on the Lab's promise to showcase points of view that fall outside the mainstream. The site pulls together a weekly advice column, a well-edited resource guide, bulletin boards for discussion and in-depth articles examining issues such as the loss of privacy in the workplace and a survival guide to office romances. But the site's main attraction is the workplace diaries it presents. "Illinois Casino Worker," for instance, chronicles the picaresque adventures of one casino employee who was laid off from a riverboat casino when the state she was working in passed a major tax increase on the gaming industry. In one sidesplitting entry, the employee recounts a scene where the company's CEO called a meeting to sugarcoat the forthcoming bad news. "I couldn't believe that the CEO of our company had the 'Rocky' theme song playing right before he was going to tell us that he was going to lay off 200 of us," writes the worker. "I walked out." Jennifer Vogel, the site's co-producer, says she'd been mulling over the Working Stiff idea for a long time but was too busy earning a living to get it started until Web Lab came along. The grant has also allowed her to pay co-producer Robin Marks, designer Adam Chapman and the diary writers. "You wouldn't be able to spend as much time on it if you weren't being paid," says Vogel, former managing editor of new media for Stern Publishing, which owns the Village Voice, Seattle Weekly and L.A. Weekly. "It's a myth that you don't need money to put out a Web site that would compete with all those flashy sites out there." If Working Stiff is all about getting in your face, then Living With Suicide, Web Lab's second project, is more about getting underneath your skin. The site's tag line, "Shared Experiences and Voices of Loss," perfectly captures its dual mission of providing a forum and community to discuss an eminently uncomfortable subject. John Keefe, who lost his father to suicide three years ago, was inspired to create Living With Suicide when a friend told him about Web Lab. "My initial reaction was, 'Oh, this is perfect,' because so many people are so reserved when talking about suicide," explains Keefe. "The Internet allows us to talk about suicide in a safe and supportive environment." The site features two main sections: Shared Voices, an area displaying edited first-person stories submitted by suicide survivors, and Conversations, an arena where those "left behind" can join discussion boards. Mirroring the unpredictable nature of suicide, stories that appear on the Shared Voices page are randomly selected from an available pool. Current stories include one letter written from a son to his dead father, another by a mother writing about the suicide of her 19-year-old daughter and one from a wife unhinged by the unexpected suicide of her husband. "I'd always considered my life rather boring, and I liked it that way," writes the wife. "I tried to be compassionate and open-minded, but sort of looked down my nose at people who experienced divorce or had alcohol problems. I knew someday I might have to face illness and even death, but I never expected to become a widow at age 33. And I certainly never expected to lose my husband of 11 years to suicide. I felt like I had died but my damn body wouldn't oblige me."