If spinning is an intense political skill, former eBay CEO Meg Whitman is doing her very best at trying to create a silk purse out of a sow’s ear.

As Om Malik reports on GigaOm, Whitman–who is trying to nab the Republican gubernatorial nomination in California–told a radio interviewer recently that “actually I think Skype will prove to be a good acquisition for eBay.”

Well, good if you mean the $2.6 billion purchase of the Interent telephony that didn’t ever work as Whitman had effusively promised in 2005. Or the ugly lawsuits over it. Or the successful shakedown by its co-founders to get a big chunk back.

You get the idea.

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Carl Icahn, the activist billionaire investor who made such a noisy fuss in his quest to force management and other changes at Yahoo, is taking a much quieter leave from the Internet giant’s board.

He said “there was not a need at this time for an activist investor” on Yahoo’s board.

That’s true, of course, but here’s BoomTown’s quickie analysis: Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz completely ignores him.

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Oh my. Oh my. There is almost nothing BoomTown can say about a rumble that was captured on an Apple iPhone on a San Francisco Muni bus.

A fight between two women escalates over some kind of seat issue and it is sure to become an Internet sensation.

Appalling, but there is very little that will go on anywhere without being uploaded and viewed–probably to YouTube, which has a new logo, seen here, advertising that fact.

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Unlike the gripping back and forth of the fight over Yahoogle last year, the approval process for the search and online advertising partnership of Microsoft and Yahoo is chugging along slowly but surely as the Justice Department has deepened its investigation by reaching out to a broad range of publishers, advertisers, public interest groups and rivals for comment recently.

But, so far, there is still no significant external challenge to the MicroHoo deal, even from Google, the likeliest company to try to scuttle or, at the very least, slow down the deal.

In other words: Zzzzzzzzzzz…

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BoomTown just got this interesting memo that Yahoo CMO Elisa Steele sent out to her staff immediately in the wake of the deal for Microsoft to take over Yahoo’s search technology business two weeks ago.

I render it unto you, dear readers, since it shows just how intent the top managers of Yahoo are, especially internally, in reassuring those concerned that Yahoo had not just gutted itself and how it would remain as innovative as ever.

Also amusing–for reasons I cannot understand since it is an internal memo–is the use of the code name for Yahoo, which is called Yale, after the famous university in New Haven, Conn.

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Obviously, the dream CEO for Yahoo is News Corp. President and COO Peter Chernin.

And, no surprise, he is the No. 1 choice of most inside and outside Yahoo in the wake of the news late yesterday that its current CEO and Co-Founder Jerry Yang is stepping down.

Well, Yahoo would certainly be a challenge for Chernin, in terms of a corporate cleanup challenge, especially compared to figuring out how to make bank on plush toys from “The Simpsons.”

But there are many other contenders for the job, despite the slog it could be. Here’s BoomTown’s list…

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Talking to Yahoo shareholders as if they were particularly thick and surly teenagers, Yahoo Chairman Roy Bostock articulated his umpteenth defense of the board’s handling of its dealmaking with Microsoft.

“I’d like to take you back–with all the hoopla, all the publicity that has surrounded the company, I think there has been a great deal of misinformation,” said Bostock about Yahoo’s dealings with Microsoft over the last year, speaking at its at its annual meeting this morning.

Thanks, Roy–glad you finally cleared things up!

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Ah, lovely breakfast pastries of all kinds tumbling down from the tables outside the Imperial Ballroom at the San Jose Fairmont this morning at Yahoo’s annual meeting.

But, of course, no Carl Icahn and the noisy proxy fight circus that would have followed the shareholder activist here.

Which is kind of a relief, really, after a very fraught year for the troubled Internet company.

As to news that is likely to come out of the meeting, which starts at 10 a.m.?

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Oh dear, oilman T. Boone Pickens has apparently been Yanged.

That sounds like something that would happen out on the back 40 of a Texas ranch that no one in the clan ever discusses in polite company.

Actually, losing about $50 million is also something moneymen like Pickens don’t like to talk about either, even if he is as rich as can be.

Of course, in dumping his 10 million shares so precipitously, Pickens’s parting shot showed exactly what Yahoo’s big weakness is as the company heads into its annual meeting on Friday: an increasingly depressed stock.

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Well, it will not be nearly as interesting as it would have been had activist shareholder Carl Icahn been attacking full-throttle in a proxy fight.

But Yahoo’s annual meeting on Friday will be more of a humdinger than usual.

So many moving parts, including who, who, who will Yahoo and Icahn decide on for the two other new board members besides Icahn?

Actually, BoomTown mostly wants to know who gets to sit next to Icahn at the first board meeting. I vote Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang!

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BoomTown was all busy trying to think of execs to replace Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang, as pressure mounts on him to right the troubled Internet company.

But now, Yang’s position feels safer than ever and it’s his nemesis–Microsoft–that needs a new leader for its long-stumbling online services business.

Microsoft is already been cracking, according to sources, with a wish list of internal and external candidates that CEO Steve Ballmer is now considering.

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Is Microsoft about to make another move on Yahoo? Or perhaps on AOL? Or is it just getting ready to articulate strategic plans for getting serious about the online search business on its own at its financial analysts’ meeting tomorrow morning?

Or perhaps–and this might be the best strategy for the moment–the software giant is actually managing to stifle itself and wait to return to the playing field when things settle down a little bit.

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A source close to Yahoo’s thinking emailed and declared that BoomTown was misinformed and ignorant of the insider mechanics of high-level corporate wrangling when I suggested in a post earlier today that the settlement between Yahoo and Carl Icahn was perhaps not the time to break out the bubbly.

You know, because Yahoo’s stock is still moribund, morale is still low, Microsoft is still looming and the economy is still tanking.

Other than that, Yahoo sources wanted to let me know the Icahn truce was a win.

And that is absolutely true, technically speaking.

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Okay, a show of hands of those who don’t want to hear another word about how incompetent the other side is in the now-settled proxy fight between activist investor Carl Icahn and Yahoo.

Icahn, whom Yahoo insisted last week was unfit to even turn on a computer, now appears to be perfectly capable of leading the troubled Internet company as a board member, along with two cronies of his choosing (with Yahoo’s consent).

What’s not clear–except for removing uncertainty and noise–is exactly what this means for shareholders or how it gets Yahoo back on track or even how a possible deal with Microsoft is now struck.

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Could the new and improved Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang actually manage to beat back the proxy fight being waged against him by activist investor Carl Icahn?

It increasingly looks that way, with only 12 days to go until Yahoo’s annual meeting on August 1.

But exactly which Yang will be running Yahoo, if he does win, is probably the most important question shareholders need to ask.

Would that be the seemingly energetic Yang of the past two weeks, invigorated by the battle with Icahn and his new best friend and Yahoo foe, Microsoft?

Or will it be the other Yang?

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