WASHINGTON, D.C. – Several recent nonsensical comments made during media interviews by Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin have prompted journalists to invent a new punctuation mark that they hope will make her remarks easier to print, add clarity to her ideas and allow the American public to understand them better.

After much bipartisan disagreement, journalists and pundits alike celebrated when the new punctuation became law in an emergency late-night session of Congress, with President Bush signing the bill just this morning.

The new punctuation mark, called a palin, resembles a period, except slightly larger, hollow, and containing several barb-like protrusions on its exterior. Instead of merely pausing, as in the case of a period, or raising the pitch of one’s voice slightly, as in the case of a question mark, the palin instructs the reader to disregard the entire preceding sentence, and replace it with another, more meaningful one.

“Sarah Palin is just a Main Street maverick,” Republican presidential nominee John McCain said this week. “She doesn’t know the lingo of Washington. She doesn’t speak, read, or understand that language.”

With others saying that Palin doesn’t speak, read or understand English either, the McCain campaign itself had been urging bipartisan cooperation to sign the new punctuation into law, warning that if it failed in either the Senate or the House, America’s media infrastructure could collapse within days, bogged down by meandering, disjointed strings of words, completely made-up foreign policy statements, and sentences containing nothing but prepositions.

To illustrate the utility of the palin, McCain pointed to a remark made just last week by the Alaska governor, when she was asked by CBS’s Katie Couric what newspapers or magazines she reads. Her original response was, "All of them, any of them that have been in front of me over all these years." However, after adding a palin to the end of the sentence, journalists were pleased to discover that her response then read, “Mainly Newsweek and Washington Post, Katie.”

Although hailed by many as a breakthrough in modern linguistics, the palin has its critics. Some have decried it as a "bailout” for the Alaska governor. One House member, speaking on condition of anonymity, said disgustedly that the palin resembles “a moldy donut with an eyebrow.”

Sources close to the McCain campaign have admitted feeling alarmed each time Palin gets tongue-tied on the air, but say that in spite of her now-famous “word bridges to nowhere,” they remain confident they can ”rein in Sarah Palin, and shore up her word economy.”

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