The point is to catch the eye of people who are just scanning the page. The first thing they'll see is the "TAKE ACTION NOW, Oppose NSA spying!" picture, which sort of leads you to believe this is another PATRIOT act or something. I can imagine someone seeing that, thinking "Not again, this stuff is endless, my senator never responds to my calls anyway", and closing the page.

Obviously ideally people will read past the biggest font on the page, but that doesn't always happen.