Nov. 3--WHEN I asked Larry Martin whether castigations of the governor already had begun during the brief few minutes the Senate had been in session before breaking for lunch Tuesday, the chairman of the powerful Senate Rules Committee immediately shushed me.

"We've about got everybody under control," he said. "Don't give them any ideas."

Not that anyone needed to.

Last week's two-day session of the Legislature will come to be known as the Boeing session, but it started off as something very different. If ever there was a set-up for a name-calling, finger-pointing, score-cheap-political-points session of the Legislature, it was last week. There were plenty of juicy targets, plenty of people who had every right to blame others for the unemployment benefits mess that lawmakers had been summoned back to town to clean up, and plenty more -- including what, a half-dozen gubernatorial candidates? -- who easily could have decided to capitalize on that mess to try to grab the attention of the abundant media on hand for just such potentialities.

Rep. Gilda Cobb-Hunter could point a finger at majority Republicans for letting federal unemployment benefits run out on thousands of laid-off South Carolinians by refusing to even give a hearing to her bill that would have prevented the problem ever happening.

Rep. Kenny Bingham could point a finger at the Republicans and Democrats who defeated his Employment Security Commission reform bill that incorporated Ms. Cobb-Hunter's fix, because they wanted to protect the thoroughly discredited status quo.

Democrats in the Senate, though they had not tried to fix the problem themselves, could castigate majority Republicans for allowing the jobless glitch to go unfixed.

Anyone in either body or either party could blister the leadership at the Employment Security Commission for not lifting a finger to let legislators know they needed to make a technical change in the law -- or Gov. Mark Sanford for creating such a combative situation with the commission and the Legislature that few noticed when others brought up the topic.

Any single legislator could gum up the whole process by raising an objection to fast-tracking the unemployment benefits fix or that economic incentive package that might just have become the final ingredient necessary for the biggest economic development get in state history.

And all that was without even considering the whole Sanford mess, which any senator could easily spend hours bloviating about, and which Rep.