(FORTUNE Magazine) – Historians will record, or better yet forget, that every one of the following happenings happened in 1986, during the tenure of an administration said to be quite conservative: The Attorney General's Commission on Pornography recommended that people who ''perform sexual acts for commercial purposes,'' as in X-rated theatrical productions, should be covered by the Fair Labor Standards Act. In general, the Meesemen seem to have been quite concerned about the lack of government regulation in the pornography field. ''Unlike other businesses, the regulations governing the production of obscenity are largely self-imposed or nonexistent,'' the report noted, adding worriedly that the industry has been called the ''last vestige of laissez-faire capitalism.'' News stories about the death in a plane crash of Samora Machel, who had taken Mozambique on the path of Soviet-style Marxism, quoted the White House as expressing deep regret and characterizing Machel as a ''voice of moderation,'' presumably because when his country was threatening to totally fall apart, he proved he was a pragmatist after all by asking for American aid. Midwest Importers of Cannon Falls, Minnesota, returned a whole batch of teddy bear hats to Taiwan because they had entered the U.S. lacking any slits for the bears' ears, which turn out to be required under U.S. customs regulations even under Republicanism. Stated reason for the regs: Without the slits, somebody might sell the offending headgear as children's clothing, and as everybody knows, you just cannot bring diminutive raiments into the U.S.A. except under special regulations designed to enforce the kindly textile quotas $ that are repeatedly stated to be preserving jobs in Carolina mill towns. The Agriculture Department tackled the farm surplus problem yet again when it announced in October that it would of course continue paying farmers to not grow grain on 20% of their acreage and furthermore would now begin paying them $2 a bushel for not growing grain on an additional 15% of acreage. The new program caused the New York Times reporter to daringly comment that we might well be witnessing ''a move still further away from a pure reflection of . . . free-market philosophy.'' Congress produced an Administration-approved immigration act featuring tough new sanctions against companies that take on aliens lacking certain kinds of required identification. Just to make things really interesting for personnel managers, the act also features tough new penalties for any among them who discriminatorily fail to offer employment to aliens. The Job Training Partnership Act, which Labor Secretary Bill Brock has identified as ''a model for human resource programs,'' finally began putting federal money into training young people to create hamburgers at McDonald's, previously known to have trained large numbers of young people without federal money. The State Department suddenly turned out to be far more affirmative toward the United Nations than had been the U.S. Congress, and it turned out in October that the executive branch was not only prepared to give the U.N. $100 million (Congress had gone for maybe $60 million) but now mysteriously viewed this organization as ''a key forum for American foreign-policy interests,'' as the New York Times characterized the views of Under Secretary John C. Whitehead in a story that failed to list any U.N. votes supportive of those interests.