procedure. some of it, apparently, unintentional. but in some instances, the audits found that there were cases where they went too far and sometimes the fisa court that does oversee this pushed back and said they needed to adjust what they were doing. it is still unsettling to many members of congress because it s yet another new piece of information about how the nsa works. these are its own internal audits that were done. edward snowden provided these documents at first to the washington post. the nsa is responding, although not going point by point through these new allegations but acknowledging that these kinds of mistakes do happen. when i contacted the nsa, they told me that the 2700 instances in one year was actually above average, higher than they normally see. so again, some of this is technical. some of it is sort of kind of the every day mess-ups that happen in a workplace. in this instance, it s involving issues that are really sacred to people, privacy and what the gove
erosion in the poll numbers as president obama s approval rating at 50% and there will still be more time and right now there doesn t seem to be any type of damage to his standing at least from these polls so far. you and the first team bring up is this a scandal or bureaucratic incompetency and right now jay carney made the comment in the daily briefing that says that no one in the white house intervened in the then ongoing investigation into irs targeting of conservative groups. i just got a copy of that, and you heard peter allude to that today, but you bring up a big question in all of this scandal, versus incompetency. the danger for the obama white house is that they want to be able to do some big things and implement the health care law to be able to push for a comprehensive immigration reform while using the power of the government to do these things and having even if you say they were bureaucratic mess-ups and folks that don t do their job well and this does erode the
this really looks bad. what is he going to do? only two options, yank everybody out, make it look like they re bailing out of iraq just like we did in vietnam. send a rash of new troops there. neither one of them is going to work, he ll take them out. do you have any concern at all for the 16,000 americans that are there now? yes, some of them are working outside the green zone. we have a 102-acre compound inside the green zone, but some of the contractors are working in other areas, particularly people who are training police. the cia operatives and the people who are training the air force. the cia is now in charge of security assistance right now, right? that s right. what does that mean? it means in theory it s going to be centrally located. there won t be any mess-ups. there s one central headquarters. in reality it means that there are not enough forces on the ground to actually ensure the security of the contractors we have there. that s a fragile situation. it i
gallup polls where before all the serial mess ups, he was down by about 15 points. what explains for the 15-point swing? nothing to do with the republican candidates running for president. what this has to do with is the fact that this president slid out of town, slid out of the contr count rye while they blue themselves up with the super committee. that s not i think it s the sherry, that is not that is not a plausible response, but in a conversation about mitt romney today in south caroline, gingrich had a critical answer. listen to this. is there anything that you wouldn t do to be president? sure, there lots of things i wouldn t do. i wouldn t lie to the american people. i wouldn t switch my positions for political reasons. that sounds great, but is gingriching issing that mitt romney is a liar and that he is prepared to lie to the american people by shifting his position?
and he says it isn t. oops! yeah, last week when they announced that secretary gates and secretary clinton would be appearing together on a couple of the sunday shows, i thought that was very smart. it would ensure the two of them are on the same page. i didn t think their problem would be that one wouldn t be on the same page as president obama. and so i think i know where secretary gates was coming from. because i know him a little bit better than i know president obama having worked with him. i think the problem is secretary gates and president obama understand where they re going on this? they probably do. it s one those little bit of a mess-ups but it seems very stark when you play the radio address and then gates comments and then secretary clinton following that did try to, you know, put it back in the box. she did because she said that what really meant by that was we may not have specific vital interests but our allies in europe do and that s why we re defending it. i j