A reader describes the scene: "Meg [Whitman] relaxes by violating the privacy of a small dog." The friendly image of a woman, her dog Eastie and her dog's ladyparts ran with a fawning profile by Jon Swartz in USA Today that alludes to a possible gubernatorial run by the former eBay CEO and current Republican Party operative. C'mon, I know you can come up with a better headline. Leave it in the comments and we'll crown the winner by replacing the title of this post. Yesterday BerthaAgrippa gave us a tickle with "Enabling intimate one to one customer relationships."

Jerry Yang, you're not helping the local economy. Silicon Valley unemployment reached 6.5 percent last month, up from 6.4 percent in July. It's the fourth month in a row that the number increased, reports Digital Daily. Hewlett-Packard recently announced it plans to cut 24,000 jobs, and an analyst said eBay needs to lose 1,500. But we're curious: Have any startups had layoffs? The snidely buoyant attitude of South of Market's bubble dwellers is unlikely to change until their friends start getting pink-slipped.

Starting next month, eBay will no longer allow most transactions to be paid for by check or money order. Now you must used one of the approved electronic methods, especially PayPal and certainly not Google Checkout or Checkout by Amazon. Makes business sense: Mail transactions are probably a sink on customer service resources, as payments don't arrive or bounce bounce when they do. And eBay earns no vigorish from check or money order transactions as it does with PayPal, marginally increasing per-transaction profit — as the release states, "Ultimately, it's eBay's goal to have buyers always pay for their purchases within the secure confines of eBay." There are a few exceptions, however, notably including the "Mature Audiences" category. Because really, who wants to buy a used dildo with a credit card?

eBay has hired Deutsche Bank to help it sell procrastination tool StumbleUpon after buying it only a little more than a year ago in May 2007. The news follows an analyst's report earlier this week that the company needs to lay off 10 percent of its employees as well as an update from employee-written company reviews site Glassdoor.com that says eBay CEO John Donahoe carries only a 28 precent approval rating. Eavesdropping on a neighboring train rider yesterday, U.K. blogger Dan Wilson picked up some anecdotal evidence of eBay's internal rot as well.He overheard an eBay executive call the company a "total lost cause." Taken by itself, the conversation, which we've copied below, comes off as just another understandably disappointed in life middle manager griping to a friend. But given the mounting bad news, doesn't train rider's rant comes off a more evidence that eBay is as "fucked" as he says?

Know what a piss-poor economy means at company's like eBay? Besides layoffs, silly. It means great bargains! eBay classifieds exec Jacob Aqraou says that because times are tough, now is the time for eBay to snatch up smaller classifieds websites at low prices. Aqraou told the Wall Street Journal the company wants to buy a couple Eastern European and Scandinavian sites as well as domestic sites targeting car dealers and real-estate agents. Alexa tells us the a list of popular Scandinavian classifieds sites includes Blocket.se, Finn.no, and Eniro.se. Aqraou said eBay will announce its acquisitions within the next several weeks.

As 158-year old investment bank Lehman Brothers goes down in flames, an angry employee is taking out his frustrations on eBay. A user going by the handle jmcclane92 is selling a "Lehman Brothers Nalgene Water Bottle (never used)," which he says Lehman CEO Dick Fuld told him was "unbreakable, but he also said that about our mortgage business 2 months ago. Caveat Emptor, I guess." Also for sale: a messenger bag, a gym bag, a hat and a Lehman Brothers guide to New York City. So far, our guy is up $170.25, which could buy him about 781 shares of Lehman stock.

Auction giant eBay may have to cut ten percent of its 15,000-strong workforce if CEO John Donahoe wants to keep his job, research firm Wedge Partners reports. Considering that Donahoe will receive up up to five years pay if he gets canned, we wonder why he'll bother. The good news for the grunts is that cutting payroll probably won't happen until at least after the election, in order for Republican groupie Meg Whitman to save face. (Photo by AP/Douglas C. Pizac)

When it became obvious over the weekend that investment bank Lehman Brothers would finally fail and that no one was going to rescue it, Merrill Lynch CEO John Thain realized the market's reaction today would tank his company as well. So Thain met with Kenneth Lewis, CEO of Bank of America, and the pair reached a deal to sell Merrill Lynch to Bank of America for $44 billion. Which is, you might recall, around the price Microsoft wanted to pay for Yahoo. Of course, that kind of offer won't be coming for Yahoo again any time soon. While not so severely or directly, Lehman Brothers' collapse and insurance giant AIG's tottering on the brink will affect your tech portfolio today. Before this morning's open the company's stock was already down 3.83 percent on premarket trading. Watch Yahoo and nine other tech stock's continuing destruction or — dare you hope? — miraculous resilience on live stock charts below.Click to view

Bidding for an Australian's copy of Google's comic-book press release on its new Chrome browser closed after 17 bids at AU $454.99, or approximately $363. If all proceeds weren't being donated to charity, we'd have a truly disturbing waste of money on our hands here, especially considering the Chrome presser isn't even the best "Google" comic available on the auction site.

"Boys pants, half-off." That's the punchline to one of our favorite Michael Jackson jokes. ("Why did Jackson go to Wal-Mart?") But now you really can own a pair of Jackson's underpants, via the creepiest eBay auction since Courtney Love's Papsmearpalooza For Charity. From Page Six:

A tipster writes us to complain about eBay subsidiaries Skype and PayPal's response to identity theft. Reading his letter, which we've copied below, you'll see the problem is not so much that Skype and PayPal wouldn't refund the money the thief spent using our tipster's account. Rather, it's how inefficiently the companies responded to the problem. They required our tipster send three fraud reports and a letter over several weeks before finally explaining that no, they wouldn't give him his money back. Another customer with the same problem writes on the Skype forum: " Is there no support here? Is Skype asleep?"

Here's the listing of the jet Alaska Governor Sarah Palin told the Republican National Convention she "put on eBay." We've since learned state officials indeed did list it on eBay — three times — but never sold the aircraft using the site, and eventually had to go through a traditional aircraft broker. Does the listing offer any insight into the Republican candiate for vice president? Just this: Palin can augment her 80 percent approval rating in Alaska with a claim she's 93.8 percent approved by the buyers on eBay. In fact, the state of Alaska's only negative eBay review — "Didn't say anything about dry rot" — came back on December 15, 2006, 11 days after Palin took office.

During her speech at the Republican National Convention, VP nominee and Alaska governor Sarah Palin said that when she took office she first started cutting state spending by selling her predecessor's jet. Then Palin nailed a crowd-pleaser saying: "I put it on eBay." And it's true, she did. But eBay, then helmed by Palin's fellow RNC speaker Meg Whitman, couldn't handle the business. Palin's people listed the jet three times on the site, but no one would bid a minimum of $2.5 million. "The eBay thing didn't work out very well," a local paper wrote after the failures. Palin eventually sold the jet using a traditional aircraft broker, selling it for $2.1 million — $500,000 less than the state paid.

When she was CEO at eBay, Meg Whitman was known for her speeches. Or at least, she was known for her love of them. Her talent for them, not so much. What happened when she addressed a crowd of people who weren't drawing a paycheck from her? Speaking before prime time during the Republican National Convention last night, Whitman dutifully stuck to the McCain campaign's talking points in a 10-minute-long — long, long, long — speech on prosperity through lowered taxes and offshore drilling. Cameras showed the crowd ignoring her 5 minutes in. From that point on, Whitman was little more than background noise for conversations with other delegates. Now we know why Whitman only made McCain's list of 20 finalists for the VP job he eventually gave to Alaska governor Sarah Palin, who brought down the house with her own flinty partisan jabs later that night.

Republican presidential candidate John McCain is set to announce his VP today and the New York Times says he's ruled out former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney, Minnesota governor Tim Pawlenty and Alaska governor Sarah Palin as possible running mates. (Update: McCain ended up picking Palin after all.) Does that mean McCain will go with former eBay CEO Meg Whitman, whom he recently described as one of the three wisest people he knows? A Democratic member of Congress thinks so, according to the Atlantic Monthly.Of course there are many Democratic and Republican whackjobs in Congress who know nothing about anything. I'm more inclined to believe McCain will pick Republican-in-Democrat's-clothing senator Joe Lieberman than an executive from a stumbling company whose position on things like abortion won't help McCain with the right-wing Republicans he needs to turn out in November. Still, Whitman wouldn't be a bad pick, would she? (Photo by AP/Dharapak)

If your acting career isn't going the way you had hoped, may we humbly suggest you kick start things by buying yourself a role in a summer superhero blockbuster? "But that's impossible," you're no doubt saying to yourself. "Hollywood is the quintessential meritocracy, where with nothing but hard work, talent, and some good luck thrown in, all your wildest fantasies can come true!" Well you keep telling yourself that. We'll be over here, emptying our 401k and cashing our Bar Mitzvah bonds to make sure we win this Spider-Man 4 VIP Experience eBay auction, a bounty including:

21-year-old billionaires in the making? To tell the truth, the youngest Forbes has come up with in the past decade was Elon Musk at 27. That was back in 1998, with only $22 million. Musk's face is more lined, but he still isn't a billionaire, even after cashing out from PayPal's sale to eBay. Forbes at least has some standards — only reason I can imagine Zuckerberg isn't in the piece is because his share of Facebook's valuation is still mostly theoretical. As for Bebo's Michael and Xochi Birch? They're back to their birthday announcement and e-card concern BirthdayAlarm.com, not content with a cabin in the hills at all. (Photo by Ryan Anson/Bloomberg News/Landov)

Retired eBay CEO and McCain campaign national cochair Meg Whitman will speak on the second day of next month's Republican National Convention. The second day — dedicated to the theme of prosperity in tough times, according to a press release — is also the same day McCain's yet-to-be-named running mate is scheduled to speak. McCain could do a lot worse than to ask Whitman to take the podium for that time slot. Some think he's seriously considering it.Asked recently who were the three wisest people he knows in his life, McCain included Whitman in his answer. McCain's stump speech also regularly includes a claim that 1.3 million people make a living off of eBay and that proves America is headed in the right direction. Of course, some of those 1.3 million people are particularly unhappy with eBay these days, complaining as the auction giant messes with its fees in an attempt to become more like Amazon. Whitman's aggressive stance on the H-1B visas for foreign workers — she thinks there should be more of them — would hurt McCain with the midwestern xenophobes who dread a national anthem sung in Spanish. But then again those people don't like the moderate-on-immigration McCain much already. If Obama doesn't choose Hillary Clinton, it would also be a tactical grab for some of disaffected centrists who might admire a woman who played hardball while leading eBay for 10 years. (Photo by AP/Dharapak)

eBay, having failed to catch on in the heavily-wired nation of South Korea, is in talks with Korean site Gmarket. A few days ago, Gmarket announced Q2 sales of nearly $1 billion, which generated $35 million in revenue. Yahoo bought 10 percent of the company in 2006 for approximately $60 million. [NYT]

Luxury goods-maker Tiffany — you know, the one which sells the gays their wedding rings — is appealing a federal district court's decision clearing eBay of responsibility for counterfeit product listings. The jewelry company sends eBay 135,000 takedown notices a year, and wishes eBay would do more of the work for it. eBay's play-it-cool response: "Tiffany's decision to carry this litigation on after the District Court's decision doesn't do anything to combat counterfeiting." Much like eBay itself. [Atlanta Business Chronicle]