Before there was Scarborough County and Morning Joe, there was BlabTV.

Former Congressman and Pensacola native Joe Scarborough stopped by the BlabTV studio on Tuesday, Aug. 11, to tape a segment for The Daily Brew.

“This is home for me. Blab is how I got elected, how everything got started,” said Scarborough, who is the co-host of Morning Joe on MSNBC.

Joe grew up in Pensacola and attended Catholic High School. He was Florida’s 1^st district congressman from 1995 to 2001. After he left Congress, he became host of the MSNBC show Scarborough Country. It was the first time Joe had visited BlabTV since the station purchased new sets for the studio.

“This is crazy,” he said. “Sincerely crazy. We used to have sets where if you sneezed too hard they would fall down.”

But very quickly into the taping of the show, Scarborough and The Daily Brew co-hosts Mollye Barrows and Carly Borden started talking about other kinds of crazy:

Donald Trump. Congress. And Pensacola city hall.

Scarborough said he fought for a strong mayor for a long time. And he was glad to see Pensacola decided to go for a strong-mayor form of government.

“But there are about right now 30 to 40 law firms all in the middle of lawsuits all over the place. It’s crazy. It’s obviously chaotic and I hate to see it.”

Joe said he particularly hates to see the political chaos here because Pensacola is such an amazing city and every time he travels home for a visit he’s shocked by how great the place it.

“But we all need to be working together,” he said. “For instance, something as simple as getting more nonstop flights into this town. There are so many people at NBC that I’ve brought down here and that love this place and they would love to come down and vacation and maybe even get a second home here.

“But it’s really hard to get into Pensacola from New York and other major cities across the country.”

His biggest frustration with Pensacola and its politics is the difficulty of getting things done.

“We all need to all be working together rather than everybody suing everybody,” he said.

But, he added, what’s happening here is what’s happening across the country.

“Government just doesn’t work,” he said. “It doesn’t work here and it doesn’t work in D.C. “

One of the reasons Joe is such a fan of a strong-mayor form of government is that he’s traveled across the country and seen the positive impact a strong mayor can have.

“You look at cities in especially South Carolina. You look in Greenville, they’ve the same strong mayor there for 20 to 25 years. Go to downtown Greenville on a Friday night and you’re more likely to hear German spoken than southern accents. One of the reasons is they’ve brought in so many jobs from across the world. The city is exploding and there’s this renaissance and money is pouring in and the quality of life for everybody in South Carolina is growing.”

This is why Joe still believes a strong mayor is a good move for Pensacola.

“I hope we can have a mayor and have a city council and have a community that works together,” he said.

But, as Joe pointed out, it’s not happening.

“It has always been so splintered in Pensacola,” Joe said. “This is an amazing community but for some reason city and county government has always been dysfunctional here. And I just don’t get it and it’s still happening.”

While Joe was in town, he also threw out the first pitch at Tuesday night's Blue Wahoos game. The team handed out more than 2,000 Joe Scarborough bobbleheads. Here's a clip from today's "Morning Joe" that features Joe at the Blue Wahoos game.

Click here to watch it