Cannot access some project descriptions.

Do you have a link to the object that caused this, or perhaps an example script that can help us see where the problem might be?

Sure, what i'm doing is asking for information on projects using this code to store it in a database:
         cursor.execute("INSERT INTO `lpd_projects`(`datasource_id`, `name`, \
        `display_name`, `web_link`,`description`, `last_updated`) VALUES (%s,%s,%s,%s,%s,%s)",
         (datasource_id, p.name, p.display_name, p.web_link, p.description, datetime.datetime.now()))

this is inside a helper method that takes a project p, as I loop through launchpad.projects. it works fine until around the 72 project where it then gives me the no server_side permission issue which refers to the description of the project.

Can you insert "print p.self_link" before this statement, so that you can see exactly which project it's failing on?

https://api.launchpad.net/1.0/girden is the project it stops on.

I can't see quite what's going on there, as that project appears to be public at least at the level that the code you've shown would care about. However, in general, iterating over launchpad.projects can return projects that contain non-public information, where you may have access to see some very limited set of attributes (such as name) but not to see others (such as description), even if you're logged in. You'll need to be prepared to handle permission failures when doing that kind of thing.