-Question. Can I take your photograph?
-Err, um,,,.. well, yeah I guess, what for?
-Oh, no reason in particular…

Note to progs. Before you continue drawing optics of the little boxes you enjoy placing the electorate in, you might want to make sure the people you use for representation are indeed within the boundaries of those categories.

Yahoo News – Time magazine’s March 5 issue, hitting newsstands Friday, carries the coverline: “Yo Decido. Why Latinos will pick the next President.”  “For the first time in our history, we have a Spanish sentence as our cover line,” Rick Stengel wrote in his editor’s note.

The cover, illustrating Michael Scherer’s story about how Latino voters in Arizona could impact the 2012 presidential election, features the faces of 20 people readers would assume are Latinos.

But at least one of them is not. Michael Schennum, who appears on the cover photo in the top row, half hidden by the letter “M” in Time’s iconic logo, says he is half-White, half-Chinese–and definitely not Latino.

Schennum, a staff photographer at the Arizona Republic, was one of more than 150 “Latino” voters photographed by Time photographer Marco Grob in Phoenix earlier this month. But according to Schennum, neither Grob nor Time ever told him the subject of the shoot.

“They never told me what it was for or [asked] if I was Latino,” Schenum wrote in his Facebook page, according to his friend Michelle Woo, a blogger for OC Weekly.

The magazine says it’s sorry for the mix-up. (read more)