Barack Obama's campaign has released some details of his overseas trip, including a list of foreign leaders with whom he plans to meet. What they hadn't wanted public, though, were certain details about the schedule of the trip; it's common to keep such things embargoed from public release for security reasons, especially when traveling to a war zone. But one person hasn't respected that embargo -- Obama's rival for the presidency, John McCain.

Reuters made the catch, noting that in public remarks McCain made at a fund-raising luncheon on Friday, he divulged the likely timing of Obama's stop in Iraq. As Politico's Ben Smith observed, "Ironically, McCain and the GOP have been demanding for months that Obama go to Iraq; his comment may have made the trip more complicated."

Obama is tentatively scheduled to meet with a wide range of leaders while he's out of the U.S. According to NBC's First Read blog, that list includes British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, as well as the country's opposition leader, David Cameron; Germany's chancellor, Angela Merkel, and its foreign minister; French President Nicolas Sarkozy; Jordan's King Abdullah; Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and a number of Israelis, including Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, President Shimon Peres, Defense Minister Ehud Barak and Benjamin Netanyahu, once the country's prime minister and now its opposition leader.

John McCain's campaign has just released its latest ad, which, according to Time's Mark Halperin, will be running on national cable and in 11 battleground states.

The spot targets Barack Obama on his foreign policy, especially regarding Iraq and Afghanistan. "Barack Obama never held a single Senate hearing on Afghanistan," the ad's narrator says. "He hasn't been to Iraq in years... John McCain has always supported our troops, and the surge that's working."

That first point, about Senate hearings, is misleading at best. As Sen. Joe Biden (D-Del.) pointed out earlier this week, Obama only chairs the relevant subcommittee, and the full committee has held enough hearings on Afghanistan to make a subcommittee hearing unnecessary. And, it turns out, McCain hasn't even attended a single Senate hearing on Afghanistan, despite being the ranking member of the Senate Armed Services Committee.

Via my friend Steve Benen, I see that John McCain said on Thursday that his proposal for a three month holiday from the federal gas tax might not go far enough.

"I think we ought to seriously look at whether we need to have it be longer or not depending on what the economy (does)," McCain said. "I think we have to consider all options but the fact is we need a gas tax holiday. We need it, we need it, we need it very badly. The Americans that are hurt the most are low income Americans that are driving the oldest automobiles."

The truth is McCain can propose making the holiday as long as he wants, but the consensus among the experts on the issue is that the holiday simply won't help consumers. As I've noted before, the only person it might truly benefit is McCain, who could get some political advantage out of it.

Where is Queen Latifah when you need her? Apparently, not all of Hillary Clinton's supporters are getting the Democratic message about U-N-I-T-Y.

The Wall Street Journal reported yesterday that 25 prominent Clinton supporters met Tuesday with Carly Fiorina, a key advisor to presumptive Republican presidential nominee John McCain. Fiorina said the women she met with are "intensely uncomfortable with the notion of a President Obama."

Included in the meeting were numerous "Hillraisers" -- activists who raised more than $100,000 dollars for Clinton's presidential campaign. Also present at the meeting were members of together4us.com (read as ToGetHer4Us), including Lady Lynn de Rothschild. Rothschild recently appeared on Fox News to explain the raison d'etre of the organization.

Fiorina said she discussed a wide range of issues with the supporters, including McCain's anti-abortion stance. "John McCain has a very strong record of being pro-life, as do I," Fiorina told the group, adding, "They knew that. This was not a one-issue crowd." Clinton, of course, is pro-choice, as is Obama.

One Clinton backer at the meeting, Amy Siskind, told Fiorina that if McCain would promise to support insurance coverage for birth control and paid paternity leave, among other issues, that she and the others present could attract "hundreds of thousands and maybe millions of votes" for McCain.

This isn't the first time Fiorina has made the news recently. The former CEO of Hewlett-Packard grabbed headlines in early July for saying that health insurance should cover birth control -- a stance McCain had voted against in the past. Fiorina's recent prominence within in the McCain campaign has even led to some speculation that she may be a potential vice presidential candidate.

German media is reporting that Barack Obama's campaign has scrapped plans to speak in front of Berlin's historic Brandenburg Gate. The site had been the location for speeches by Presidents Kennedy and Reagan, but German Chancellor Angela Merkel reportedly objected to its use in what she felt was a campaign event.

Instead, Obama will speak in front of the Victory Column, another Berlin landmark that, according to Bloomberg News, "celebrates Prussia's victories over Denmark, Austria and France in the late 19th century." Bloomberg also notes that the Brandenburg Gate will still be visible in the distance.

I'd say that this might temper some of the phony outrage coming from the right over Obama's trip, but given Charles Krauthammer's latest column, in which he asked, "[W]hat exactly has he done in his lifetime to merit appropriating the Brandenburg Gate as a campaign prop?" I don't hold out much hope for that happening.

Barack Obama hasn't even left the country yet, but conservatives are already claiming that the media coverage of his trip to Europe, Iraq and Afghanistan is biased in his favor.

They're pointing to an article in Thursday's New York Times that reports on the plans for anchors from the three major networks to accompany Obama for parts of his tour, and an imbalance in the amount of coverage given to Obama compared to rival John McCain.

"[W]ith Obama embarking on his world tour, all three broadcast networks will have their anchors trailing him, apparently hoping to record every bon mot that escapes from his lips," Ed Morrissey wrote in a post at Hot Air. "When was the last time we saw any network anchor doing a remote, let alone all three at the same time? ... This is nothing more than the media fawning over Obama, and looking to give him as much earned media as they can. Their pretense of objective reporting has been ripped away, and the media looks like little more than groupies vying for the attention of a pop star, hoping that some of his popularity rubs off on them."

(For the record, the last time we saw an anchor doing a remote was last month, when Brian Williams was in Afghanistan.)

Brent Bozell, the president of the Media Research Center, a conservative media watchdog, released a statement that read, in part:

The liberal media's shameless slavishness to Sen. Barack Obama knows no bounds... The liberal media obviously cannot help themselves. They are already neck-deep in the tank for Sen. Obama, yet they have made the decision that still there just hasn’t been enough loving coverage of him. So the Big Three networks all determined that the remedy would be to go on the road for live daily on-air massages.

This trip with Sen. Obama must be like the Grateful Dead, the Rolling Stones and the Beatles all rolled into one for the liberal media. For all three nightly news anchors to get to go on the road with him must be a dream come true.

Along with the statement was a release from the MRC, which complained, "Arizona Senator John McCain has made three trips overseas since March. No anchor has travelled with him on any of them and they provided little if any coverage of any of them."

As so often happens, the critics in this case are jumping to conclusions about bias without pausing to consider simpler explanations. For example: one of the three trips McCain made was to Canada. Another was to Colombia. That's not the kind of thing that gets viewers. Yes, McCain's other trip was to Iraq, but it came during March of this year, after he had already become his party's presumptive nominee, and while Obama and Hillary Clinton were still battling. The Democratic primary remained the story that viewers cared most about, and McCain was just not going to get much coverage while that continued.

As for the amount of attention given Obama, there are a few good explanations for that as well. As one network executive explained in the Times' story, by focusing as much attention on it as they have, and pressing for it in the first place, the Republicans are partially responsible for making Obama's trip as big of a story as it is. Additionally, there's the good, old-fashioned profit motive to think of. Media gossip blog Gawker did a good job of explaining that in a post on Thursday, pointing to how well magazines with Obama on the cover have sold as evidence of why the networks care so much about this -- simply put, they want the ratings. And finally, it's the middle of July, a down time for news in general, and reporters are looking for something to talk about. This story will provide the networks with some excitement and will come with good images from the countries visited; having compelling footage is always important in determining what gets covered on television.

Update: Just saw that at Newsweek's Stumper blog, Holly Bailey wrote about another important distinction between the two candidates' visits to Iraq, this one stemming in part from the fact that McCain's most recent trip was official Senate travel:

In what could be interpreted now as a possible strategic misstep, the McCain campaign chose not to take reporters along for the ride, forcing media outlets who wanted to cover the newly elected GOP nominee to travel on their own without any guarantee of getting anywhere near the senator. The small group of scribes who made the trek (Newsweek chose not to) faced a logistical nightmare, from arranging last-minute foreign visas to struggling to keep up with McCain as they flew commercially from stop to stop...

McCain was on official Senate travel, and aides rightly worried about an onslaught of stories questioning whether he was improperly using his Senate office to benefit his presidential campaign. It was also a campaign in transition, and they worried they didn't have the manpower logistically to handle a large press corps on an overseas swing.

John McCain's campaign has been doing its best to put Barack Obama in the worst possible frame before he leaves for his trip to Europe, Afghanistan and Iraq. It has settled on a message about him being motivated only by politics when it comes to his position on Iraq, it has put out a memo attacking him and now it has released what it's calling a "documentary" about his statements on Iraq. The Obama camp isn't taking it lying down.

In a memo of its own, Obama's campaign took the fight to McCain on Thursday, working to tie him to Bush and portraying him -- in much the same way McCain is doing to Obama -- as rigid, inflexible and unwilling to acknowledge reality when it comes to Iraq. In the memo, Obama spokesman Hari Sevugan says, "All John McCain has ever looked for in Iraq are reasons to stay there indefinitely." Sevugan continues:

He has stubbornly championed a strategy of fighting an unnecessary war in Iraq regardless of the shifting facts offered to justify it, regardless of the levels of violence and political progress in the country, and regardless of the gathering strength of the Taliban and Al Qaeda in Afghanistan. And now, as he advocates a policy of staying in Iraq indefinitely, it is clear that he is going to continue to adhere to George Bush’s ideological agenda even as every other critical national security challenge is neglected, and our troops continue to fight tour after tour of duty and our taxpayers spend $10 billion a month in Iraq.

Via Politico's Jonathan Martin, here's John McCain speaking at a town hall in New Mexico earlier this week:

Could I mention the presence of my friend Congressman Steve Pearce who I believe will be joining me in the United States Senate.

Pearce is running to replace his fellow New Mexico Republican, Pete Domenici, in the Senate. If he and McCain both win their elections, Pearce actually would not join McCain in the Senate. He wouldn't be inaugurated until next year, at just about the same time McCain would be leaving the Senate for the White House. (Of course, you can nitpick this joke if you really want to, and point out that the new Congress will be sworn in before the new president is, but it's likely that whoever wins the presidency will resign his Senate seat before the new Congress comes in. Both Bill Clinton and George W. Bush resigned from their previous posts the month before they were first inaugurated.)

At a press conference in New York on Thursday, former President Bill Clinton announced that his foundation had struck a deal with leading pharmaceutical companies to provide key anti-malarial drugs to Africa at cheaper, stabler prices. That should be a story by itself, but of course some reporters couldn't resist asking him about the presidential election, and Clinton answered.

Speaking about Barack Obama, with whom Clinton has reportedly been upset, Clinton said he and Obama "had a good talk," and that he'd campaign with the presumptive Democratic nominee "whenever he asks."

Clinton also commented on remarks Jesse Jackson made about Obama while on a live mike at a Fox News studio. "An apology was a good thing to do ... If all of us lived on live mikes, 100 percent of us would be embarrassed," Clinton said.

Much attention has been focused on the bizarre legal reasoning behind the Bush administration's "torture memos," a series of documents starting in August 2002 that OK'd detainee abuse. The memos have been widely criticized for authorizing illegal acts. But in a House Judiciary Committee hearing on Thursday, former Attorney General John Ashcroft raised the possibility that the CIA started torturing at least one detainee before any of the memos were even written.

If true, that would suggest that the CIA realized that the agency might be breaking the law and sought legal cover after the fact. Attorneys say that, hypothetically, this could make it easier to prosecute those who condoned or conducted the abuse before the torture memos were produced.

Intelligence agents from the United States and Pakistan captured suspected al-Qaida operative Abu Zubaydah on March 28, 2002. According to news accounts and congressional testimony, Zubaydah's interrogation began soon after his capture. His interrogation was reportedly particularly brutal, and he is one of three detainees confirmed to have been waterboarded.

But the first so-called torture memo, sometimes called the Bybee memo, was not produced by the Justice Department until Aug. 1, 2002. It defined torture down, breaking with long-established standards to restrict it to pain "equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death."

Ashcroft admitted to the committee that he participated in the production of that first memo in August 2002 for Zubaydah’s interrogation. "I do generally recall that I was made aware that a legal opinion relating to the interrogation of al-Qaida detainees was being prepared," Ashcroft said of that memo. "A draft or drafts were provided to my office, that I was briefed on the general contours of the opinion's substantive analysis and on its conclusions and that I approved its issuance."

But during questioning, Rep. Jerrold Nadler, D-N.Y., pointed out that the abuse of Zubaydah had reportedly begun weeks, if not months, earlier. "Did you offer legal approval of interrogation methods used at that time ... prior to August 2002?"

"I have no recollection of doing that at all," Ashcroft responded. He added that he did not remember anyone else at the Justice Department doing so either. He said later in the hearing that Zubaydah's interrogation "was done without the opinion that was issued on the first of August."

Ashcroft's testimony at least raises the possibility that the CIA had started abusing Zubaydah before the agency received any legal cover. This might explain why the Bush administration pushed so hard for the torture memos -- the torture had already begun.