US News

Spamming on our dime

Your tax dollars at work.

Just when you thought the transit system couldn’t be any more wasteful . . .

A high-ranking employee of the MTA was found spamming thousands of employees — during working hours, on public computers — with an e-mail complaining about the inferior treatment of women.

“The status of women in our country remains marked by discrimination in employment, healthcare, sexual crime and family life,” reads a message by official Gloria Colon. She sent it on Aug. 13 to all 1,698 employees of the MTA’s Bridges and Tunnels division, plus an unknown number of folks in sister agencies.

In a passage one employee found suspiciously leftist, smacking of victimization and partisan politics, Colon continued, “Women’s votes will be crucial to success in the upcoming Presidential election.” She did not name the candidate she supports.

Alerted to the angry e-mail, one MTA bigwig told me, privately, “That sentence gives me pause.”

Is this your state government in action? Or are your taxes financing an encounter session for self-proclaimed victims of the GOP’s “war on women”?

We have a right to know.

Colon, 65, a lawyer, has worked for the MTA’s Bridges and Tunnels division for 24 years, the last 14 as an equal-employment opportunity officer, making about $140,000 a year. As such, she is tasked with investigating serious allegations of racial and sexual discrimination at the agency.

It is not her job, however, to encourage complaints.

Her e-mail recited, unchallenged, the most controversial aspects of feminist orthodoxy. “The University of Chicago Booth School of Business recently reported that only 50 percent of women MBA graduates with children are working full time, 10 years after graduation, compared to 95 percent of men,’’ she wrote. This ignores the fact, which I’ve been reporting for years, that many women leave the rat race — by choice — after having kids.

Counting heads doesn’t bring equality.

Whether one agrees with Colon that women are roadkill in a patriarchal conspiracy, the question remains: What the devil does this have to do with New York’s crossings?

One employee who received Colon’s e-mail was outraged by what the worker called “shoving her extremist left-wing ideology and her political partisan agenda down people’s throats, while on MTA time, using MTA resources at the expense of the New York state taxpayer and the always fleeced MTA customer.”

“Gloria is entitled to her opinion. But like all other employees, she is not entitled to engage her partisan grievance-mongering on the public dime,” the employee said. “And here is stupid us, thinking that the role of the MTA is to provide for the cost-effective and efficient administration of trains, buses, bridges and tunnels.”

Reached at her office, Colon was surprised by the controversy, even as she acknowledged disseminating her screed during work hours on an MTA computer.

“The general condition of society, which anyone would agree with, is not favorable to women,’’ she told me.

She said her message was tied to Women’s Equality Day on Aug. 26, which commemorates women getting the right to vote in 1920. It’s one of “five or six’’ such missives she sends out each year, most of them dealing with events like Black History Month or Hispanic Heritage Month.

“I get information from a couple of magazines. I read it, and I pass it forward to employees.’’

She said she was not instructing anyone to vote for a particular candidate. She also lauded her agency for maintaining a 50 percent minority workforce.

MTA spokesman Adam Lisberg defended Colon: “Gloria’s job is to talk about equal opportunity, to read up on equal opportunity and to make sure the MTA gives everyone equal opportunity. As part of that, she is certainly supposed to be paying attention to women’s issues.’’

How an investigator for a public agency can turn into a onewoman grievance squad for the allegedly oppressed is anyone’s guess. It explains volumes about government.

‘Wal’ nuts! Shame on you, Quinn

Take that!

Mayor Bloomberg’s former BFF, City Council Speaker Christine Quinn, and other elected officials have made sure this city won’t get a low-cost, job-creating Walmart store.

The mayor is rightly furious.

Officials lined up with job-killing labor unions to block Big Wally, fumed the mayor, days after it was announced that Walmart won’t be setting up shop in low-income, unemployment-ravaged East New York, Brooklyn.

Unions “try to pressure local officials,’’ said Hizzoner. “The fact that some elected officials caved to that pressure does not do [them] any good with the public, and also they should have trouble looking at themselves in the mirror.’’

Now, watch as precious tax money and jobs continue to roll into the Wal-friendly suburbs. A disgrace.

Stop, Lewd-insky

What’s left to tell? Monica Lewinsky, whose name became a euphemism for a sex act, plans to reveal secrets of her raunchy sex life with Bill Clinton in a tell-all book.

“No one will hire her and she can’t get a job because of Clinton,” a Monica pal told The Post. “She needs to make money somehow.”

Bill’s ’90s mistress, who made Americans think deeply about cigars, writes that Clinton’s carnal appetites veered toward multiple partners and sex toys, a Monica pal told The National Enquirer. Monica also will publish tragic letters in which she declares love to a man who called wife Hillary a “cold fish.’’

Sorry, Monica. We’ve heard enough.

Looks like a Lo’ blow

Can it be? Was Lindsay Lohan wrongly accused?

La Linz was busted for allegedly leaving the scene of an accident after cook José Rodriguez accused her of hitting his leg with her Porsche SUV outside a Manhattan nightclub. Yet a Bellevue doctor determined Rodriguez’s X-rays were negative. A surveillance video only showed Lindsay driving slowly and carefully.

Lindsay may be a public menace. She might also be a fat target.

Hey, Paris has been violated!

New Yorkers are constantly photographed on cellphones, their every word tweeted and Tumblred. Now, city dwellers must protect their privacy in unlikely places: the back seats of taxi cabs.

Paris Hilton spewed while riding between Fashion Week parties, “Gay guys are the horniest people in the world. They’re disgusting. Dude, most of them probably have AIDS.’’

Little did the former reality-TV and sex-tape star know that she was being recorded by a slimy cabby, who leaked the tape to RadarOnline.com.

Paris apologized. Her people said she was talking to a gay friend and merely showed concern for men’s health. Gay and straight New Yorkers agreed the recording was an outrage.

My advice: Don’t talk. You don’t know who’s behind the wheel.