Wasilla, Alaska (UIP)– Shocking news last night as former Republican vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin announced that she is following in the footsteps of the noble senator from Pennsylvania, Arlen Specter, and is switching parties to become a Democrat.

This news comes just five days after Palin appeared as the keynote speaker at a Tea Party rally in Searchlight, Nev., where she appeared in her former guise as an angry white female and told the crowd of at least a dozen or so people that she was tired of government intrusion into her life and that she was going to do everything she could to “send Harry Reid back to Searchlight where he would be lucky to be elected as part-time street sweeper.”

Sometime since then, Palin said, she had an epiphany and realized “the weather of Nevada must’ve unfrozen my cold, steely Alaskan heart,” and that she had awakened from her icy slumber of neocon-ism. “What the hell was I thinking?” She also resigned as a Fox News contributor, effective immediately.

Reaction was swift from the Democrats across the nation.

Specter said he was happy to bring Palin on board with the Democrat Party and hoped that she would come to Pennsylvania and help him in his re-election campaign. “I might need some help because I’m down 20 points in the polls,” said Specter. Specter denied reports that he may switch back to the Republican Party. “Now that we have Palin, there’s no way I would ever leave the Democratic Party unless I felt there was a primary candidate who might beat me, and then of course I would have to consider it.”

Nancy Pelosi said through one of her many spokespersons that “Palin was always one of her favorite governors,” and she was always impressed at how she worked hard to bring people together in a state as large as Alaska. “It’s a very, very difficult task to run a state as massive as Alaska, when you consider how close that state is to Russia, it’s great to have somebody in the party who has close-up, hands-on foreign policy experience. Heck, she can see Russia from her house!” Pelosi also offered Palin one of her private planes and said that she was confident Palin would not sell the plane and give the money back to the people now that she is a Democrat.

Great things could be in store for Palin with her new party.

President Obama cut short a White House meeting with Israeli Prime Minister What’s-His-Name to rush to a hastily called news conference, in which he took credit for the Alaska Pipeline and said that he and Michelle have asked the former governor to tutor Sasha and Malia so that they can, “learn from one of the great women in world history.”

When asked about Palin’s possible vice -residential aspirations in the 2012 election, President Barack Obama was quick to respond:

Sarah Palin is one of the few brilliant women in this nation who has experience at running for that office. She was much more successful that that Ferraro lady a few years back. If I were considering a change with Joe Biden, I would look for somebody with experience, and the race would be between Al Gore and Palin. Right now, Palin would have the upper hand because Gore is busy Saving the Planet, and that’s a pretty awesome responsibility for one man.

Staring into a mirror, Obama added that he could relate more to Palin now with some of the struggles that she had to go through as mayor of Wasilla, “It doesn’t matter how big or small the city or nation is that you have to govern, I’m finding that it’s not all that easy,” said the young, brilliant President as he displayed his unerring, puckish, and utterly charming sense of self-deprecation once again.

The American media uncorked champagne at the news.

CBS broke the story on its evening news last night with Anderson Cooper filling in (or is he?) for Katie Couric. Cooper said how he was “always impressed by Palin’s brilliance and understanding of the issues.” CBS ran part of the interview with Palin that they apparently didn’t have time to run during the presidential campaign of 2008, which showed Palin explaining Einsteinian theory to the perky Couric, who seemed both fascinated and baffled as she learned that the solutions of the field equations are metric tensors which define the topology of space-time and how objects move inertially. Pretending to understand, Couric nodded vigorously in the cutaways.

ABC aired a special segment with Diane Sawyer, in which she exclaimed in her high voice that she gets when she is excited about something, “This is a great day for American women. We have somebody whom we can all emulate as she begins her run for the presidency in 2016.” ABC tried to reach Hillary Clinton for comment but she was in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, building water buffalo-dung houses at the request of the White House.

Over at MSNBC, Chris Matthews said the “tingle up my leg has gone a little further up, if you know what I mean.” Keith Olbermann called John McCain the “Worst Person in the World” for forcing Palin to play second fiddle during the Maverick’s disgraceful 2008 campaign, and Rachel Maddow asked for Palin’s number in the hopes of spending a weekend with her while Todd is out of town, dog-sledding or whatever. The low-rated cable network also announced they will host a Palin Telethon to help her raise money for pretty much anything she wants to raise money for, including the legislative repeal of Roe v. Wade.

During his regular show with guests Michael Moore, Joy Behar and La Toya Jackson, Larry King was first told who Palin was and then repeated an ancient story about how he thought he once saw Palin on a cruise to Alaska that he went on with Sandy Koufax to reminisce about the old days back in Brooklyn.

The website TMZ said it has acquired exclusive photos of Levi Johnson doing charity work for the homeless in the Boston-Edison neighborhood of Detroit. The photos are fuzzy and the person is wearing a hat, sunglasses and baggy clothes and in fact bears a startling resemblance to Eminem, but TMZ says it is in fact Johnson. helping humanity because he has “turned my life around since I became the father of a baby that everybody loves with this new revelation from my possible future mother in-law, if I play my cards right .”

The National Organization of Women issued a press release that said how excited they were to see how Palin is handling her special-needs son: “It is the essence of modern American womanhood to stay home and be a mother.”

All eyes were on David Letterman during the taping of his show in New York. Letterman praised Palin for her work as mayor of Wasilla and joked that, “shooting a moose from a helicopter was the most exciting thing he could think of other than taking an intern into his back office.” He issued Palin an open invitation to appear on his show anytime and as often as she wants. His Top Ten list featured brilliant people in world history and included Stephen Hawking, Leo Tolstoy, Isaac Newton, Karl Marx and, of course, Sarah Palin.

The world is a better place this April first now that Sarah Palin has seen the light.