Chauvanism is alive and well

Editor:
Regarding a story that appeared in The Post-Star

on Dec. 6: "Rep. Gillibrand announces she is pregnant."

First of all, I must admit that I am a male chauvinist and that there are, thankfully, differences between men and women. There are many occupations suitable for women and their physical attributes. Carrying a weapon while serving in the Armed Forces and firefighting are not suitable lines of work for women to prove that they are physically equal to men. How many male police officers feel comfortable with a 100 pound female backup?

And now, I have to add serving in the U.S. House and Senate as an occupation that may not be suitable for women.

Ms. Gillibrand's current pregnancy makes a strong case for my opinion. Ms. Gillibrand was elected to serve her constituency, and while she is away from her elected office she cannot perform those duties. The taxpayers who were duped into voting for her will have to pay for her medical benefits. Yes, Mr. and Mrs. Taxpayer, Ms. Gillibrand receives excellent health benefits, courtesy of her constituents. We will be without representation in Congress for a time leading up to and following the child's birth. There will be times when she and the new baby will visit doctors. You can add those days to the total that she will not be serving her constituents.

The current base salary (2006) for members of the House and Senate is $165,200 per year. I wonder if Ms. Gillibrand will do the right thing and reimburse the U.S. Treasury in the amount of $452.60, her daily salary, for each day that she is unable to perform her elected duties. For some reason, I doubt it.

RON BLACHUT
Queensbury

As originally sent to the PostStar, reported in Crooks and Liars, and pointed out by friedpineapple in meig's journal.

There is just nothing I can say to this.

GMail security risk

Apparently, and as far as I can tell this's true, for a while GMail had a security hole that hackers were able to take advantage of. Specifically, the hole allowed hackers to steal your GMail password, and alter the filters in your GMail account, so that it would forward and delete emails with certain subject lines or keywords, so that you'd never see them in the first place, and they could also send email from the account. In the article linked above, an individual who did this found himself scammed out of a profitable webpage that he owned. For you as an individual, you could find yourself losing bank account or credit card information, for example.

The hole is now fixed, so no new hacks can happen, but what you may wish to do is take a couple minutes to check out the filters in your GMail account and make sure there's nothing there that is bad - although no new hacks can happen, if they had hacked you in the past and you hadn't noticed, the filters would remain. If you have many, do a search on the filters page for "forward" and "skip" (for skip Inbox) and that should catch the bad ones.