Can someone refresh my memory as to which Federal law protects presidential portraits from tampering. Do we have a Lèse-majesté clause somewhere?

A federal agency is trying to determine who’s been tucking slips of paper into a portrait of President Barack Obama in a federal building in Lafayette that call for the president’s impeachment.

For several weeks, someone has been tucking slips of paper from anti-Obama pamphlets into the corner of a framed portrait of Obama that hangs in the Charles A. Halleck Federal Building in downtown Lafayette. Those messages haven’t damaged the president’s portrait but they do contain the phrase “Impeach Obama.”

A spokeswoman for the U.S. General Services Administration, which owns and manages the building, says the agency is investigating the tampering with the presidential portrait.

GSA spokesman Gina Blyther Gilliam tells the Journal & Courier the agency “does not tolerate this type of behavior.”

Good for them. Nothing more intolerable than a little harmless protest against the ruling powers. One day they’re slipping Impeach Obama notes into his portrait and next thing you know they’re taping them to his back.

Maybe Obama Inc. needs to take a page from the handbook of their fellow Juiche socialists and how they handle portrait disrespect.

Most of the bodies of dead North Korean sailors who washed up on Japanese shores earlier this year after their freighter sank in the Sea of Japan had portraits of the late North Korean President Kim Il Sung and his son, the late Kim Jong Il, according to a police investigation.

In North Korea, portraits of Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il are required in all houses and public spaces. If citizens facing a disaster fail to take portraits with them while making their escape, they face possible severe punishment, including being sent to a concentration camp.

If they protect the portraits at the risk of losing their lives, they are praised by the authorities and lauded with heartwarming stories. The crew members of the Taegakbong apparently took the portraits with them, thinking not only of themselves but also their family members.

Serious stuff.

In North Korea, you are not allowed to use an old newspaper for anything other than reading if a photograph of Kim Jong-il appears in it. You must collect those editions separately and return them; anyone who uses the newspaper as scrap or to repaper something, or rolls it up to use when making a cigarette, etc. is punished.

The GSA could learn a few lessons here. So could all Obama supporters.

The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea has bestowed a posthumous award on a 14-year-old schoolgirl who drowned in a flash flood while trying to save portraits of the country’s late leaders.

Han Hyon-Gyong’s heroism earned her the Kim Jong-Il Youth Honor Award, and her school will be renamed after her, the newspaper Rodong Sinmun said on Tuesday.

Han died on June 11 as she tried to save portraits of Kim Il-Sung and Kim Jong-Il from her flooded home at Sinhung county in the eastern province of South Hamkyong.

As she was swallowed up by gushing floodwaters, the girl held the pictures wrapped in plastic sheets above the surface, according to the report on the paper’s website.

Hope, Change and Juiche.