Scarborough and crew botch basic facts about Obama admin business experience

Back in April, Joe Scarborough claimed that President Obama "has never received a paycheck ... he's never received a check from a profitmaking business in his entire life, not one check. Think about it."  Had Scarborough done more than just "think," he could have found evidence that would have quickly disproven his claim.     

Today, Scarborough was at it again.  Prompted by Rep. John Boehner's near repeat of his April claim, Scarborough and the Morning Joe crew complained about the Obama administration's purported dearth of private sector experience: 

BOEHNER [CLIP]:  You have to remember that President Obama, Speaker Pelosi, and Majority Leader Reid have never run a business, much less ever had a real job in a private sector.  How would they know what it takes to create real jobs?  So the American people continue to ask where are the jobs?

SCARBOROUGH:  Mike Allen of Politico made the mistake of coming on this show, and we asked him to name one person in Barack Obama's inner circle that had ever run a business.  And he stumbled and stammered around for a while.  And basically couldn't name anybody. Can you?

MORT ZUCKERMAN:  No. I think one of the issues --

SCARBOROUGH:  Is this unprecedented?

ZUCKERMAN:  I've never seen anything like this in the sense that there isn't a single person with serious business experience at any senior level of that administration that I know of.

SCARBOROUGH:  How do you figure out how to turn an economy around if you don't have a single person in the president's inner circle that's ever created a private sector job?

Not a single one! 

All those talking heads and they couldn't find something like this?

In Obama's Cabinet, at least three of the nine posts that Cembalest and Beck cite -- a full one-third -- are occupied by appointees who, by our reading of their bios, had significant corporate or business experience. Shaun Donovan, Obama's secretary of Housing and Urban Development, served as managing director of Prudential Mortgage Capital Co., where he oversaw its investments in affordable housing loans. 

Energy Secretary Steven Chu headed the electronics research lab at one of America's storied corporate research-and-development facilities, AT&T Bell Laboratories, where his work won a Nobel Prize for physics. And Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, in addition to serving as Colorado attorney general and a U.S. senator, has been a partner in his family's farm for decades and, with his wife, owned and operated a Dairy Queen and radio stations in his home state of Colorado.

[...]

Two of the Obama appointees could be considered entrepreneurs -- the very people Beck would "unleash." Vice President Joe Biden, officially a Cabinet member, founded his own law firm, Biden and Walsh, early in his career, and it still exists in a later incarnation, Monzack Mersky McLaughlin and Browder, P.A. (The future vice president also supplemented his income by managing properties, including a neighborhood swimming pool.) And Office of Management and Budget director Peter Orszag founded an economic consulting firm called Sebago Associates that was later bought out by a larger firm.

It's also worth noting that if you examine a larger group of senior Obama administration appointees, you'll find that more than one in four have experience as business executives, according to a June study by National Journal.