Editor's note: Michael Ackley's columns may include satire and parody based on current events, and thus mix fact with fiction. He assumes informed readers will be able to tell which is which.

Who thought we might recall with nostalgia those days when devotees of pornographic movies had to view them behind the closed draperies of home, or were forced to sneak into the local "adult" emporium to see them in some sticky-floored viewing booth?

Ah! Those were the good old days.

Today you can watch the latest XXX releases in the comfort of a spacious room in a high-rise, nationally franchised, mint-on-the-pillow hotel.

Clearly, there always has been demand for so-called "adult" fare, but somehow we didn't expect that the executives who run the big hotel chains would see their in-room television service as a porno profit center.

How was the idea broached in the board of directors meeting? Did somebody say straight out, "We can make a pile by supporting an industry that degrades women and showcases the prostitution of both sexes"?

More likely it happened by indirection. E.G.: "You know, perhaps it's time this company treated adults as adults by giving them freedom of choice. (And never mind that the choice would put our hotels on the same moral level as a Pussycat Theater.")

Pornography, as approved de facto by the boards of directors of some of America's largest corporations, has moved squeaky-clean hotels into the province that once belonged solely to the 16-millimeter studio, with possible ties to organized crime and definite ties to prostitution, drug abuse and blackmail.

It's time the big hotel chains answered for their exploitation of this dirty business. We'd like to ask you, good readers, to keep track when you stay at hotels and motels, especially the major chains, and let us know whether the hard-core stuff is available on the room TVs. We'll follow through with queries to the hotel public relations departments to ask how the practice is justified.

(Column continues below)

Hot issue: If you didn't have doubts before about humankind causing global warming, you must have them now that the United Nations has endorsed the idea.

When a corrupt institution dominated by corrupt governments takes a position on scientific question, it's a pretty good bet that the science itself is corrupt. Remember: Those governments are waging economic war on the United States, with the assistance of the useful idiots of our Congress who refuse to allow the expansion of domestic oil exploration.

Time to retire? "Doonesbury" is among comic strips on hiatus at our regional daily newspaper. Is this the beginning of the end for Garry Trudeau, who long ago traded edge for ideology?

Good or bad news for Al Sharpton? Tawana Brawley's parents want her 1987 rape case reopened. Perhaps Sharpton can recover the $345,000 defamation judgment awarded Assistant District Attorney Steven Pagones, the New York prosecutor he had accused of participating in the alleged rape. More likely, opening the case would only remind Americans of Sharpton's recklessness.

Capital idea: Death penalty opponents are beside themselves over a spate of studies that shows executions reduce homicides, particularly in those states where murderers regularly and timely pay with their lives. Could somebody please tell me who said something like the following: "It is the sureness of punishment, not its severity, that deters crime."

Lair of the limousine liberal: California's Silicon Valley has spawned many supporters of "progressive" politics. (And remember the Blind Partisan's Dictionary definition of "progressive: adj., n – socialist.") Latest salients on the roster are Andy and Deborah Rappaport, who have started the New Progressive Coalition to raise funds for Democrats.

Question: When capitalism has been so good to them, why is it so many millionaires from the high-tech sector are socialists? Answer: Just remember they graduated from American universities. There they were taught not only to feel guilty about their success, but to see that society as a whole helped expiate that guilt.

I are a collich gradiate (or, not worth the paper): What grade would you give a recently awarded bachelor's degree? C-minus would be about right.

According to the National Endowment for the Arts, the percentage of those with bachelor's degrees who are "proficient in reading prose" fell from 40 percent in 1992 to 31 percent in 2003 – and 40 percent was nothing to brag about.

For this devaluation you can thank the equality-of-outcome cabal's successful campaign to dumb down American public schools and post-secondary institutions. What do you suppose the prose-proficiency score is for doctoral degrees? Twenty-five percent? Twenty?

How about doctor of education degrees? What!? Fifteen percent? Ten?!

Related special offers:

"The Marketing of Evil: How Radicals, Elitists, and Pseudo-Experts Sell Us Corruption Disguised as Freedom"

"Kinsey: Crimes & Consequences"