Hidden Messages

It's easy to miss hidden meanings in the information stream. News photographers consider themselves artists, and try to frame their subjects to convey as much meaning as possible within a single photograph.

For example, someone did a study of the number of "halos" there seemed to be hidden in the photos of the campaign trail. I really need a link to that, since it's kind of hard to explain. The photographers often try to arrange themselves and the subject so that some kind of circle is behind their head, simulating a halo, as in this picture of Howard Dean:

So I wondered what the hell the guys in the newsroom were trying to tell us with this weird-ass picture of Kerry from last week:

Until, of course I remembered what the POW*MIA flag looked like. Unbelievably, the Kerry campaign seems to want to associate itself even more with the Vietnam War than it already has, which is almost completely. They should probably stay away from the whole POW angle; the Viet Cong actually used Kerry's "Winter Soldier" testimony to torture American POW's, after all.

What a jackass.