Hi Hawthorne,
The quick answer to your question is that no you cant make the page guides 'come-to-the-front' as you can an object that is placed on the page.
I am not familiar with InDesign but I think that there a couple of ways to align what you are wanting to place in exactly the position that you want it.
For a temporary alignment tool that appears 'on-top' you can always use the ruler guides which you can reposition using the corner handle which is the small grey box in the top left where the two rulers intersect. Hover the mouse over this and the cursor becomes and expander which you click and hold down to move. Position over your guide line and it will stay on top and you can use this as a guide to position an object to. To move one ruler Shift and drag that ruler only.
You can create temporary 'ruler guides' by 'dragging' these off the ruler. Just mouse over the edge of the ruler and when the cursor becomes an expander drag ( by holding the mouse down ), a ruler guide to a desired position and place it as a marker. This will appear as a green line which wont be 'on top' but it does extend to the edges of the page, and I would say that most often at least part of this line will show as a reference which you can quickly drag the ruler to to check alignment. You can create as many of these as you want, both horizontal and vertical, and can get rid of these quickly by 'dragging' them off the page or all at once via the Arrange menu. ( Arrange>Ruler Guides>Clear All Ruler Guides)
Something else that you can possibly use would be the "Set-Transparent-Colour' tool. When you have a picture selected it should appear on your picture toolbar. It looks like a pencil pointing into a 'V' ( as you mouse over it it will confirm what it is of course. ) When you select this tool and click on a background colour, usually the white area around the picture, it will make that colour transparent BUT this is not perfect for all occasions as it makes all pixels that colour in the whole picture transparent so check when you use it that it does not have any unintended consequences. I must admit that the odd time I have used this tool and have had to paste and group a white filled shape behind it to colour fill the bits that I didn't want transparent particularly if you are pasting on a coloured background. Not best practice I suppose but it works if you are in a hurry.
The last option that you could look at is the 'Edit-Wrap-Points' tool. I think that it is on the picture toolbar but if not you can get this button, or any command button for that matter, by right clicking the toolbar and selecting Customize and then the Commands tab and going through the menus and 'dragging' a command onto the toolbar that you want it to appear on. The 'Edit-Wrap-Points' button is in the Arrange commands and looks like a dog surrounded by a blue border with some black dots on the border. When a picture is selected and you click this button the border of the picture will change to a red dotted line with some 'wrap points' at the corners that appear as black dots on the line. You can click on these 'wrap points' and drag them in or out as you want but most often you use them to reduce unwanted clear space around a picture, particularly if the picture is placed on a text box and you want the text to wrap around it. You can add as many other wrap points as you want simply by clicking on the line and dragging them to the desired position.
As I said, I am not familiar with InDesign but each program has its own way of doing something. Hopefully this will give you some options to be able to do what you want in Publisher.
Regards
Makonz
