For all the ink that's been spilled on the Madoff investment scandal, I've read nothing about its impact on funding for progressive women's causes -- which is considerable. Simply put, only a small pool of foundations are funding litigation and advocacy work related to criminal justice or constitutional rights; the pool that supports related programs targeted to women is smaller still. With the recent shuttering of two of Madoff's clients, the Picower Foundation and the JEHT Foundation, that pool has shrunk to a puddle.

Let's hope the cameras will document the effect of the $42 million shortfall that progressive nonprofits will face in 2009

Picower was one of a handful of foundations willing to stick their necks out and significantly fund the three organizations that handle virtually all major reproductive rights-related litigation and legal advocacy in the United States. Now the Center for Reproductive Rights needs to make up a $600,000 shortage in 2009; Planned Parenthood is out $484,000; the ACLU's Reproductive Freedom Project is off $200,000.

The economic crisis makes it particularly difficult to replace that kind of money. Meanwhile, there's a backlog of bad new laws that need to be contested. It's likely to grow this year with the popularity of mandatory ultrasound laws for abortion patients, one of the favorite new litigation strategies of antiabortion activists. (Seventeen states considered more than 30 ultrasound bills in 2007 alone.)

Consequently, there's a lot riding on the Center for Reproductive Rights' recent challenge to Oklahoma's law, the harshest in the country. It compels physicians one hour prior to performing an abortion to do an ultrasound on the patient and point out various features, while -- per CRR's press release -- "preventing a woman from suing her doctor if he or she intentionally withholds other information about the fetus, such as a severe developmental defect." (Translation: information that might influence a woman to terminate a risky pregnancy.)

But who's going to fund this very expensive suit? Or the challenges to similar laws that will pass while this case is in court? Women also stand to lose ground with the closing of the JEHT Foundation, one of the country's premier funders of criminal justice reform initiatives, including drug policy reform. Both issues have particular resonance for women. Thanks to stringent mandatory sentences for even first-time, nonviolent drug offenders, women's rate of incarceration grew by 757 percent between 1977 and 2006 -- nearly twice the rate for men. Women of color, who are scrutinized, prosecuted and punished more harshly for drug-related offenses than their white counterparts, bear the brunt of these policies.

JEHT, like Picower, was a rare grant maker in an already select field. It funded initiatives aimed at ameliorating the hardships women face as a consequence of their involvement with the criminal system, including grants to the Corporation for Supportive Housing and the Stop Prisoner Rape Project. Additionally, Sarah From, director of public policy and  communications for the Women's Prison Association, lauds JEHT for "being one of the few foundations to fund criminal justice policy reform." (JEHT provided WPA with seed money to start its national Institute on Women and Criminal Justice.)

"They addressed a real need in the field," says From. "Now there will be fewer resources for this work overall, and we'll have to work harder to convince new funders to take a look at our issues for the first time."

Vivian Lindermayer, CRR's director of development, sounds uncannily similar talking about Picower. "They understood the critical role litigation and legal advocacy play in securing women's equal access to quality reproductive healthcare. Picower's closing will have a major impact on CRR and organizations like us."

The media's obsession with wealthy individuals who have been ruined by Madoff and feel betrayed is understandable. But when that story wears thin, let's hope the cameras will document the effect of the $42 million shortfall that progressive nonprofits will face in 2009 without funding from JEHT and Picower. We've only just begun to understand the implications of that loss for women's health and human rights.

So we're still calling in every few hours to the Game Spot down the street to find out when we might be able to pick up that Wii (my competitive spirit just wasn’t adequate enough to give me the fortitude to climb out of bed to stand in the snow). And yes, allegedly, we are back at work, but in actuality, my boyfriend is playing Xbox hockey on the couch (don't tell his boss!) while I spent the morning playing this awesome girly game that contributor Lynn Harris sent in to Broadsheet over the break. How can you not get sucked into a game called "Dangerous High School Girls in Trouble"?

» Continued

Have you always wanted to be a Hooters Girl? Well, your dreams could come true if you: 1) are pneumatic, 2) can enthusiastically take hot wings orders in a scoop-neck tank top and orange booty shorts, and 3) aren't the victim of violent crime -- bruises might distract from your boobs! That last requirement is according to a former Hooters waitress, who claims she was fired after a domestic violence incident that landed her in the hospital.

A Hooters Girl's hair "needs to be styled as if you're going out on a big date on a Saturday night" -- not like your date has attacked you with a pair of scissors

After the attack, Sara Dye was left with two black eyes, bruises on her face and a lopsided haircut (her attacker violently sheared her hair), reports the Des Moines Register (via Jezebel). At her manager's request, the 27-year-old agreed to take a few weeks off from the Hooters restaurant in Davenport, Iowa, to recover. Dye says, "My body appearance wasn't up to par."

The restaurant's assistant manager Michelle Duvall explains that a Hooters Girl's hair "needs to be styled as if you're going out on a big date on a Saturday night" -- not as if your date has attacked you with a pair of scissors. General manager Gina Sheedy adds that the Hooters "handbook states you have to have a glamorous appearance. It doesn't actually say, 'Bruises on your face are not allowed.' It does talk about the all-American cheerleader look." (What isn't all-American about domestic violence?)

But even after recovering from the attack, Dye says she called the restaurant and was informed by a co-worker that she had been fired. The restaurant denies having fired her, but a judge saw things differently and on Monday granted Dye unemployment benefits, noting that an "inability to work due to bruises" is not a valid firing offense. In other words: She wasn't asking for it.

Over my holiday vacation, I actually considered visiting a Hooters restaurant for the first time, reasoning that it would be an interesting "cultural experience" (also: I was hungry and it was there) -- but it turned out it was closed. Now, I'm feeling quite OK with having missed out. Their hot wings may be delicious, but this story is damn unappetizing.

Over the break, Broadsheet received a tip regarding the following story, originally carried on the sex site The Frisky, and picked up by CNN: "Why Women Shouldn't Say 'I Love You First.'" 

"At the risk of having my feminist card revoked, I think it's naive for a woman to utter those three little words before a man does," writes Wendy Atterberry, being careful to explain that it's fine for a woman to make a first move, even propose, "but an 'I love you' uttered too soon, before the man has processed his feelings and reached the same level of adoration could end a relationship that just as easily could have had an eternal shelf life."

Oy, already. It's the kind of story that can't help being irritating: First of all, because it's a glib service piece in which advice about profound life experiences is shoehorned into a few measly grafs; second of all, because it's dumb. It's asinine, right? At least that was my impression, which is why I decided to e-mail it to a handful of my male friends -- my smart, incisive, agreeing-with-me-about-many-things-over-pints-of-beer friends -- and get their take, at which point I discovered … they agreed with the article?

"I actually think that woman has a point," said the first to reply. "Most guys are emotionally retarded, especially in their youth. So telling a guy you love him before he has figured out what's going on in his own head does carry some risk."

» Continued

What better way to ring in the New Year -- a year in which we can only hope our next president will battle the recently instated "provider conscience" law, which limits women's access to contraceptives and abortion -- than to consider the extreme lengths women will go to in order to obtain an abortion. (Yay, woo, it's always a party here at Broadsheet!)

Today, in response to a new Planned Parenthood study, the New York Times reports on how women from stridently antiabortion cultures often end their pregnancies through desperate, and dangerous, means: taking a punch to the stomach, intentionally falling down the stairs, knocking back a homemade abortion-inducing concoction or illegally taking the prescription drug misoprostol, which is FDA-approved as an abortifacient when taken with RU-486.

We've written before about how the latter, the other abortion drug, is often used as a result of barriers that are economic, cultural or practical (say, the nearest clinic is a three-hour drive away). Now, the Planned Parenthood study (PDF) further explores this interesting tangle of causes, specifically among Dominican women in New York and Santo Domingo. Most basically, a non-surgical termination is often preferred because it makes the abortion seem less, well, abortion-y. Or, as Dr. Mark Rosing, who has formally studied the issue, put it to the Times: “It turns an abortion into a natural process and makes it look like a miscarriage."

» Continued

I am not a doctor, or anything close to it. But if you asked me, as a layperson with a modicum of common sense, whether to base a medication dosage on a person's actual weight or her "ideal" weight, I'd have to go with actual. It seems more logical to administer an amount likely to work on the person requiring it, rather than on an imaginary thinner version of her, no?

Well, there I go showing my lack of medical training. Says Dr. Kellie Matthews, an OB/GYN at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, "Often chemotherapy dosing is calculated using ideal body weight as a guide." So it follows that the farther you are above your "ideal" weight, the greater your chances of receiving an inadequate dose of chemo.

Matthews recently headed up a study that bore this out. Based on the records of more than 300 patients who suffered from an aggressive form of ovarian cancer, she determined "that when actual body weight was used in chemotherapy dosing the overall survival was 40 months for non-obese patients and 47 months for obese patients -- statistically identical rates when considering the relatively small size of the study." However, "[e]arlier studies had found that obese women with ovarian cancer were likely to have shorter survival times than non-obese patients with a similar type and stage of ovarian cancer." So, when a fat woman is given a dose of chemo appropriate for a thin woman, it turns out she's less likely to survive as long as a woman given an appropriate dose for her size. When she's given a dose that takes her weight into account, the difference essentially disappears. You don't say!

I can't begin to express how furious this makes me, not only because you have to wonder how many larger women died prematurely due to inadequate doses of chemo, but because until now, the lesson taken from that was that the obesity itself reduces one's chances of survival -- placing the blame squarely on the patients. Yes, as the article points out, obesity is associated with greater difficulty in recovering from any surgery, but as the study demonstrates, that doesn't necessarily affect mortality rates. Undermedicating patients, however, apparently does. How on earth did it take this long to figure that out?

I'm the lucky on-call editor today and this news is just in: Congratulations to Bristol Palin for having a healthy baby boy, Tripp Easton Mitchell Johnston.

Bristol gave the baby the surname of his father, 18-year-old Levi Johnston, although the pair is not yet married. Tripp is a somewhat more conventional and less inspired moniker than Trig, Track, Willow, Bristol and Piper, the now infamous names of grandma Sarah Palin's five kids. It's hard not to notice how American political dynasties get a wee bit less creative and robust every generation.

There is no word about whether Bristol will wed Levi, as planned last summer, after her mom, Alaska's governor, got the GOP vice presidential nomination. (It's been so long, it's hard to type that and really believe it really happened.) Both families have had their issues lately; Palin went home to defeat in November, and this month Johnston's mother was arrested for the illegal sale of the prescription drug Oxycontin. Nasty classist folks like to call it "hillbilly heroin;" I prefer to think of it as Rush Limbaugh's drug of choice. Of course, drug problems and unmarried pregnancies hit Democrats and Republicans, but one party tends to scold more.

The Oxycontin problem aside, I've been hoping since August, when the news broke, Bristol would find a better future than marrying her self-described "redneck" boyfriend. It's even possible she – and/or Levi – voted for Barack Obama, because they knew the chance of a politically mandatory wedding would plummet when John McCain lost.

In all seriousness, Broadsheet sends best wishes to Bristol and Tripp. May all mothers and babies born in the Obama era get the love and support they need, no matter the circumstances. And may all teenagers everywhere get honest and accurate information about family planning in the new year.

What a year in lady-news. We watched Hillary Clinton make her historic bid for the White House (and then witnessed her ripped apart by rabid male pundits, called the C-word in a million different ways and otherwise attacked with sexism of the "Iron my shirt!" variety). We all, even Middle America, fell head over heels in love with Michelle Obama and watched the meteoric rise of the ladies of the nightly news.

And then there was Sarah Palin. We've written enough about the woman to last a lifetime, so I'll simply offer up some free association: rape kits, abortion, teen pregnancy, Trig, hockey moms, "Nailin' Paylin," Saks Fifth Avenue, the country of Africa and -- yes, God, thank you -- Tina Fey.

» Continued

This news is vile, despicable, reprehensible, wretched -- there just aren't enough condemnatory adjectives in the world to describe it. Four men in the famously liberal San Francisco Bay Area allegedly gang-raped a lesbian, presumably because she dared to display a rainbow gay pride sticker on her car.

"Anytime there is an anti-LGBT initiative, we tend to see spikes both in the numbers and the severity of attacks"

The 45-minute attack happened on Dec. 13 in Richmond, Calif., after the 28-year-old got out of her car. The men approached her and " made comments indicating they knew her sexual orientation," according to the Associated Press. Then, one of the men "struck her with a blunt object, ordered her to disrobe and sexually assaulted her with the help of the other men." She was then forced into her car and driven to an abandoned building, where she was raped again. The attackers drove off with her car and her wallet. Police are offering a $10,000 award for information about the attack.

Avy Skolnik, of the National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs, told the AP that "anytime there is an anti-LGBT [lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender] initiative" -- like the recent anti-gay marriage ballot initiatives -- "we tend to see spikes both in the numbers and the severity of attacks." He added: "People feel this extra entitlement to act out their prejudice."

One of the most memorable lyrics about womanhood that I heard this year came from Janet Jackson. Yes, she who so eloquently sang of "control," of this "rhythm nation," offered the following verse: "My swag is serious / Something heavy like a first-day period."

Apparently, Miss Jackson's flow is different than mine. But that's not the point. No, the point is that, in this age of constant Internet critique, of 24-hour celebrity ridicule, famous artists write jaw-droppingly bad lyrics about women all the time and yet, Broadsheet almost made it through the entire year without commenting on them at all.

Which is why we must give thanks to Rob Harvilla at the Village Voice, who has assembled a fantastic match-up of the "Worst Lyrics of 2008." Unfortunately, Jackson's song came out in December of 2007, and so it did not make the cut. But other wise wordsmiths have risen to the challenge.

Not surprisingly, many of these lyrics have to do with sex. Or whatever Lucinda Williams is referring to when she sings, "I'm so glad you've stung me / Now I've got your honey / All over my tummy." (To be fair, isn't that a Winnie the Pooh reference?) Also not surprisingly, several of these lyrics came from critically acclaimed hip-hop artists. Go figure. 

Now, without further ado, let's savor 2008's pearls of wisdom. Frankly, it kind of makes me long for the days of "my lady lumps."

Usher, "Trading Places": "Skip dinner and gon' rent a movie / You order Chinese food right before you do me."

It's this kind of smooth talking that seals Usher's permanent spot as the Justin Timberlake of 1994.

Nickelback, "Something in Your Mouth": "You look so much cuter with something in your mouth."

Huh. I want my nickel back.

Katy Perry, "Hot N Cold": "You change your mind like a girl changes clothes / Yeah you PMS like a bitch / I would know"

Katy Perry, proving that obnoxious, misogynist lyrics are not the sole domain of rappers.

Pharrell, Common's "Announcement": "My dick is like a Blow Pop, baby"

Does that mean I can chomp it real hard to get to the bubble gum?

And, finally ...

Lil Wayne, "Dr. Carter": "Swagger tighter than a yeast infection / Fly go hard like geese erection"

Ladies and gentlemen -- the most acclaimed hip-hop album of the year.