After acquiring 3.5 percent of Yahoo in the week after merger negotiations fell through with Microsoft, corporate raider Carl Icahn will move forward with a plan to replace the company's board with directors expected to be friendly to resuming negotiations. Icahn could announce the alternative slate as early as tonight, Reuters reports, citing sources familiar with the matter. Which means the Wall Street Journal could run a widely expected hit piece on Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang as soon as tomorrow.

In explaining Carl Icahn's raid on Yahoo, pundits bring up his efforts to shake up tech and media giants like Motorola and Time Warner. But I think there's a better analogy in Icahn's past: TWA. Icahn's attempt to gain a board seat or broker a new deal to sell Yahoo to Microsoft will not send Yahoo soaring; if left unchecked, he will run Yahoo into the ground as surely as he did that troubled airline. Icahn's bid, and the support it is drawing from large Yahoo investors, seems premised on the notion that he can bring Microsoft and Yahoo back to the bargaining table. That seems unlikely.

Sending angry letters, going public with a hostile offer — Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer played rough with Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang and the Yahoo board during merger negotiations. Yahoo shareholders, dispirited by the failure of those negotiations, want corporate raider Carl Icahn to play rougher. Icahn purchased $1.3 billion worth of Yahoo only after large Yahoo shareholders contacted him and urged him to become involved, a source familiar with the matter told the Wall Street Journal. The man controlling the second largest portion of Yahoo shares, portfolio manager Bill Miller of Legg Mason, told the Journal he's glad Icahn joined the fray. "To the extent he can get the parties back to the table I'd be all in favor of that," Miller said. (Photo by AP/Mark Lennihan)

Yahoo might merge with Microsoft whether the CEOs of either company like it or not. Since the merger fell apart last week, corporate raider Carl Icahn has purchased as many as 50 million shares in the company and now he's "leaning toward launching a proxy contest in an effort to push Yahoo back to the negotiating table," a person familiar with the matter told the Wall Street Journal. Microsoft sources say they have not given Icahn assurance that the company will purchase Yahoo, even at a more favorable price. In 2007, Icahn purchased 8.5 percent of BEA Systems, not long before the company first rejected and then agreed to a merger with Oracle.

Investor Carl Icahn has sued Motorola to force the company to release internal documents about its cell-phone handset business. Icahn is pursuing a proxy fight to install new directors on Motorola's board and force the company to spin off or sell its handset business. Motorola calls the lawsuit a "distraction." [FT]

Icahn is the financial world's jack-of-all-trades: a hedge fund investor, a private equity investor, a corporate raider, and, his favorite guise of late, an "activist investor"—a thorn in the side of corporate management teams from New York to Korea.

BEA Systems will share financials and other internal data with shareholder Carl Icahn in an attempt to convince him that BEA is worth more than the $17 per share that Oracle had offered in an unsolicited takeover bid. BEA has not filed a quarterly report with the SEC in over a year because of an investigation into possible backdating of stock options. [WSJ]

Analysts believe that Oracle will still buy BEA ... eventually. However, since no "white knights" have stepped forward to make competing offers, the consensus is that the $17 offer Oracle initially made was too high a price. Carl Icahn, who owns 15 percent of BEA, wrote "I view your public declaration of a $21-per-share, 'take it or leave it' price as a management entrenchment tactic, not a negotiating technique" in an open letter to the BEA board. Oracle CEO Larry Ellison also seems to have a take-it-or-leave-it attitude towards BEA, having said nothing since Oracle's initial offer expired last week. "Now, both sides will probably stand back and stare at each other for a while," said one analyst. How unexciting.

Carl Icahn, the activist investor, is pressing BEA Systems to put Oracle's $17 per share offer to a shareholder vote. Icahn owns 13 percent of the software maker. "BEA is badly miscalculating Oracle's desire ... Oracle doesn't need BEA. At some point, Oracle will buy these guys, but it's completely at Oracle's discretion," says Peter Goldmacher, a Cowen & Co. analyst. Since there hasn't been a competing offer in the three weeks since the initial unsolicited bid, Oracle remains BEA's only suitor. Correction: Bitches not so jealous after all.

• Sports Illustrated and Dasani water team up for world's biggest blowjob billboard. [NYP]
  

It's a sad day for garrulous southerners everywhere: Ted Turner has announced that his time at Time Warner has come to an end. While Turner's involvement hasn't been quite so great over the past few years, he's still remained somewhat of a company icon. He gave no reason for his decision to end his involvement at the end of the term, but it seems no small coincidence that this has come just after shareholder Carl Icahn threw a burning bag of dog shit around the Time Warner offices.

• Dow Jones reorg combines print and online editions of WSJ. [AP via Yahoo]
• New Meredith editorial director Mike Lafavore fires Fitness EIC Emily Listfield and then gives himself the job, at least for now. How very Wennerian. [NYP]
• Carl Icahn's Time Warner breakup plan had a 37-page chapter on why Time Inc. doesn't fit with the rest of the company. How does John Huey react to that? "I didn't find it a very compelling chapter." Of course not. [NYO]
• Jack Shafer prefers his newscasters brunette. [Slate]
• Maxim redesign to remove "a layer of goofiness"; Graydon promises his next car will be a hybrid. [WWD]
• Breaking: Newspapers sometimes create sections as vehicles to attract advertising. [NYO]
• LAT NYC bureau chief to take on book-publishing beat, too. Because there's just not enough going on in the city itself to keep a reporter busy. [LA Observed]
• Eleven mags missed their rate base in the last half of 2005 — and that doesn't even court the half-dozen AMI titles set to miss in the next go-round. [BW]

• Investor Carl Icahn signs on Bruce Wasserstein's Lazard to join in his crusade against Time Warner management. New York feature on Icahn's clever business strategy TK soon. [NYT]
• NYT Mag bigthinker Michael Ignatieff leaves magazine, Harvard gig, and the country to rescue his native Canada from its political crisis. NYU bigthinker Noah Feldman, recently signed up as Times Mag contributing writer, seems set to replace Ignatieff there. [NYP]
• Steve Capus named president of NBC News. [NYT]
• And Rome Hartman, 60 Minutes vet, named executive producer of the still-anchorless CBS Evening News. [NYT]
• Dear Les Moonves: For the love of God, please don't make Katie Couric the CBS anchor. Please. Love, Jon Friedman. [MW]
• Conde's standard Christmas directions aren't good enough for Anna. [WWD]