git push vs. slow connection times - local commit resolution is too late

I've been bitten several times by this bug now, so I'll report it in the hopes that someone knows what to do to patch it.

Scenario - I have a remote repository that takes on the order of 10 seconds to connect to, for any operation like 'git push'. I know that there is a lag, so I intentionally have two terminals open, both visiting the same directory, one for interaction with the remote, and the other for acting on the local repository, with the hope that I can do useful work in the second terminal rather than idly waiting on the lag in the first terminal.

In the middle of rebasing a patch series, where I want to incrementally push the patches that I have gotten through so far, I used the following steps:

On the remote-interaction terminal, I push the current state of my tree: git push remote HEAD:master

On the local-interaction terminal, I move on to the next patch: git rebase --continue

then, to my horror, I find out that the commit I'm working on locally has already been pushed! Why? Because 'git push remote HEAD:master' does not determine which commit 'HEAD' refers to until _after_ it has established a connection to remote, but the stupid 10-second lag was long enough that my actions in my second terminal have changed HEAD in the meantime.

I would really love it if 'git push' would resolve all local references _prior_ to trying to connect to the remote server, rather than waiting until after the connection. That way, my remote-interaction terminal can truly be a type-it-and-forget-it terminal, where the push action I requested reflects the state of the tree at the time I requested it, rather than picking up changes made later in another terminal.