Great points and security should be taken seriously. Your point on using Etherscan is great so I want to stress it again for others. People should only log into MEW if they need to send tokens. If you find yourself wanting to check your balance frequently then just bookmark your ETH address on Etherscan. For instance, this is a bookmark for random ETH address:
https://etherscan.io/address/0x2c6d23e3d4c50bd12ea3be7be828db5ec11f467dMany benefits. No worry about logging into a fake MEW page and Etherscan does a great job of applying USD value to the ERC20 tokens in the address as well.