Guns N' Roses takes its 15-year battle with irrelevance straight to the people today, officially releasing the title track of its long, long, long, long-delayed album Chinese Democracy after years of leaks, lawsuits and general internecine drama that left a once-great rock band in yawning disarray. We've tired enough of attempting to keep up that we hadn't bothered tracking down the new single before this morning (you can hear it after the jump); it's about as soft as Axl Rose's cosmetically burnished features and, as presumed, won't make us forget anything on Appetite For Destruction. And thank goodness, because despite Democracy's Nov. 23 release date finally laid down by Interscope Records, GNR's manager hinted to Entertainment Weekly today that even more "complications" are imminent.Somewhat intriguingly, EW retracted this morning's item headlined, "Guns N' Roses manger: 'Great art takes time'" almost as soon as it was published — right around the time the single first hit the radio and began streaming online. But why? After all, rock managers are chronically bloated with braggadocio, even if shaking up their band's label and exclusive retail partners at Best Buy with suggestions that Nov. 23 doesn't really mean Nov. 23:

Goodness, the bad news just doesn't stop for Harvey Weinstein. The movie mogul and Weinstein Co. head—who recently lost his bid to move Project Runway, his big moneymaker, to Lifetime—has had a rough time lately, dealing with everything from a flagging fashion line to a flagging internet company to a flagging video distribution service. So much flagging! And now the precarious nature of Weinstein's business is clear to everybody; his own executives are abandoning him, in a terrible job market:

Apparently, this website jumped the shark-snark way back in 1868 with a newspaper called The Daily Gawker—according to Vanity Fair's fun "archive find." What sort of slander would 19th-century Gawker have inflicted upon Theodore Roosevelt, President Teddy Roosevelt's father? They bashed his strange project called "The Museum of Natural History," which they referred to as his "House of Follies":

Portfolio may be struggling to keep current during these dark economic times, but editor Joanne Lipman pulled a clever maneuver when she dispatched a cute, young reporter to meet up with Salman Rushdie at the luxe resort in Mexico. The famed author took the trip to Las Ventanas al Paraiso in Los Cabos, Mexico to promote his new book, The Enchantress of Florence, and was given free plane tickets and accommodations in exchange for showing up at two dinners and a cocktail reception. It doesn't seem like the deal was much of a success for the hotel company: A total of eight paying guests turned up for the two dinners. But that gave Rushdie plenty of time to open up about really important stuff, like Dancing with the Stars, Kim Kardashian, and his busy social life.

Cindy McCain is the saddest figure in this miserable election. Seriously, we feel real sympathy for this woman, rich and brittle and Obama-smearing though she may be. We read the Ariel Levy story. She's got a distant, temperamental, emotionally abusive husband she never sees (until election season!) and she can't even develop a painkiller addiction in peace without the press jumping all over it (because her family certainly didn't notice or care). So it's cruel, really, that the National Enquirer is jumping all over the various obvious easily disproved lies she's told on the campaign trail about meeting Mother Theresa and visiting her husband's Vietnamese hospital bed. You can click to read the story, though you won't learn anything you didn't learn from the Levy profile and the New York Times piece on her sad life.

[The actress at a fashion show for her girlfriend Samantha's sister, Charlotte Ronson, yesterday; image via Splash] Meg's new line beats the original, Lindsay Lohan Encourages You To Keep Looking At Her.

So Portfolio went with a Dov Charney cover in the midst of the greatest financial crisis since the Great Depression. Hey, what do you expect them to do—undo stuff that had already been planned? What are they, a daily? No, they're a monthly, and they refuse to get all worked up about anything. They must maintain their office's monk-like atmosphere at all costs. And their fellow business mags agree: with a little creative editing, you can make it look like you're covering this crisis without doing any extra work at all! Portfolio's response to the crisis: meetings.

The ink is barely dry on those first giddy divorce filings, and already the vultures are circling world's biggest pop star Madonna and her cuckolded soon-to-be ex-husband, "film director" Guy Ritchie. While the two stars themselves have remained relatively demure about the whole matter—Madge makes the same "emotionally retarded" joke at every concert, Guy reportedly said on the set of his new film Sherlock Holmes, "today's going to be a weird one, but don't feel awkward because this is where I want to be" while waving a copy of a British tabloid—the press has been a little more salacious. The latest Us Weekly features a gushy, long-for-that-publication article on the storied split, providing hideous and sad details like how Ritchie used to refer to sex with his Isla Bonita as "cuddling up with a piece of gristle." That's just... well, that's poetry Mr. Ritchie. How messy is this thing going to get? One hopes, because there are three young children involved, that they'll keep their cool and blunder on in private. Though discretion is not always Maddy's forte and Guy will have to come to terms with the fact that he's not really famous without his muscly bride. Though juicy details about Madonna's Kaballah-fueled romp in the twenty million dollar hay with Yankees sucker Alex Rodriguez and Ritchie's supposed on-set romance with a young British chippy promise to "entertain" for some time. Plus, there are wonderful unconfirmed tidbits about Madge slapping Guy and calling him a coward for eating chocolate bars, and Guy returning fire by calling her old and wrinkly. Whee! The tabloid press will, of course, screech and caw and ruffle their feathers, pulling smaller and smaller strands of meat from this marriage's dessicated carcass, but eventually—if Madonna and Guy play it close to their chests—they'll have to find some other moldering corpse of a blessed union to feed off of. Who's due? Um... Ashlee and Pete? Nicole Richie and that man that she married? Elton and David??

Everyone is always babbling about the "Bradley Effect"—the supposed tendency of white people to tell pollsters they'll vote for a black guy even though they're racist and won't—and how it might hurt Barack Obama in two weeks. But honestly the Bradley Effect doesn't seem to be applicable this year. Not because white people are less racist, but because they have no good reason to lie about supporting McCain. John McCain's current Election Exit Strategy seems to hinge on Western Pennsylvania and Virginia, and he's going to get those states back in his corner by scaring the shit out of white people. Will it work? McCain might want to look at the dire position modern white supremacist organizations are in; they can barely rile up the neo-Nazis to care that a black guy might be the next president! American National Socialist Workers Party head Bill White may be a neo-Nazi, but he's not voting for John McCain.

♦ Bill O'Reilly has signed a new four-year contract with Fox News worth $10-12 million a year. There is good news, though: His radio show may be coming to an end. [NYDN]
♦ More bad news for Harvey Weinstein: A handful of senior execs at The Weinstein Co. have announced their departures. [THR]
♦ How are monthly business magazines keeping up with the financial crisis? They're not, really. [NYO]
♦ The offices of the New York Times received an envelope this morning containing a "white granular substance." [Radar]

Yesterday we told you that Anne Pressly, an Arkansas morning news anchorwoman who played an Ann Coulter-like pundit in the new Oliver Stone flick W, was attacked and stabbed in her home early Monday morning (she's now expected to recover). The crime has predictably attracted a lot of international attention: it involves a pretty woman, a journalist, Hollywood, and politics. So what new facts have we learned about the case today? None at all, really. Unless you ask the media, in which case, CONSPIRACY?!?!?: In a neat trick, various news outlets are now able to go with totally opposite angles on this story—based on no new facts, and also sometimes based upon the same exact sources! New York Post:

Yesterday y'all seemed to think that the faking-it reality couple was either the Osbournes or Heidi and Spencer from The Hills. Both good guesses! I also chuckled at the suggestions that it was the Roloffs from Little People, Big World or Stella and Ratbones. Today we have a drug-addled reality star, a popstar who used to be a dud with the ladies, an escort-loving star, a gay/straight love triangle, and a TV star about to be fired. 1) "Which reality star has-been should tone down the drug use? The dethroned tabloid subject brought two eight balls of coke (7 grams) to a weekend getaway. She was last seen at 7 a.m., trying to find someone to play charades with her." [NYDN] 2) "Which man-of-the-moment popstar was not such a hit with the ladies at school? His nickname was 'Bender'" [Mirror] 3) "Talk about embarrassing. Wow. I can't decide who was the more embarrassed. This married A list director enjoys perusing escort sites and calling one to come over to his hotel room, especially when he is on the road. In this instance though he was in town, but was put up in a hotel because he had been doing press earlier in the day. Before heading home to the missus, he decided to call up his favorite agency and they sent someone over. Well imagine the shock on the face of both our director and the escort when it turned out to be the cousin of the wife's director. They had just seen each other at a family gathering two days prior. There were a lot of umms, but both decided it would be just a little too strange to do anything. Most guys would have gone home to the wife, but not our director. He called up the agency and got someone else." [CDaN] 4) "Which gay couple is fighting over a third party? Both members of this couple are in the entertainment industry, one more famous than the other. The third party, who is also a famous entertainer, has become quite the couple-wrecker due to some sexual waffling within the established couple. The most interesting fact here is that the third party is the opposite sex of the couple, and has been battling rumors about sexuality, too." [BlindGossip] 5) "If this TV personality is going to survive, she is going to have to reinvent herself. But if she keeps talking trash about her former boss, her career may be dead in the water." [BlindGossip]

I see transgressive fashionart photographer Terry Richardson everywhere around Nolita! Practically every other day. I see him walking his dog, and standing outside the deli talking on his cellphone, and in front of the bookstore. I see him on the weekend at that Szechuan restaurant on St. Mark's. Once I saw him coming out of that building with the fancy door on Bowery, and figured that's where he lived. I saw him this morning. Because of all these run-ins, and because I have always enjoyed his work, I feel that we should be friends. I mean, how can you see somebody every day and not not.... love.... this:

Matthew Broderick riding his bike in Tribeca ... Keri Russell crossing the street ... Gavin Rossdale signing autographs outside ABC ... Kelly Ripa jogging outside for a TV segment ... Ugly Betty's Becki Newton and Michael Urie hugging on the sidewalk ... Alex Rodriguez leaving a parking garage in Midtown ... Kelly Cutrone in Soho, screaming on her cell phone ... Nastia Liukin on the set of Gossip Girl ... Zac Efron, Ashley Tisdale, and Vanessa Hudgens leaving lunch at Serendipity 3 on East 60th ... Katie Holmes getting out of an SUV outside the Schoenfeld Theatre ... and Tom Cruise and Suri boarding a helicopter.

How did all those shady mortgage companies get America's finances all fucked up in the first place? By using the freakish amount of publicly available data about all of our lives to target those people who were the most needy, vulnerable, and ignorant, and reel them into unsustainable debt. Now that everything is screwed up, how are financial companies going to pull us out of this mess? The exact same way! Data mining is going just as strong as ever, and all these credit card and loan companies are really trying to bring in new customers now that their last round of customers have all gone bankrupt. Even the big credit rating firms like Equifax and Experian make huge money slicing up all of the information they have on everyone, classifying us into little demographic groups, and selling it to third parties who can then send disturbingly well-targeted (or just disturbing, period) pitches. One woman got dozens of credit card offers congratulating her on recently emerging from bankruptcy. Other people get letters from random companies that show how much the balance is left on their own home mortgage. Someone should be punched for this. Possibly these people:

Stylista debuts tonight, and all the mildly-enthusiastic reviews reveal something more important than whether or not the show is actually worth watching: Apparently, we live in a world so ironic, where the line between reality and fiction has been trampled on to such an extent, that we can't even watch a woman pretend to do her job and dole out abuse to eager victims on a set created to resemble an office without suspending our disbelief for one second. Stylista's star, Elle's fashion news director Anne Slowey, is playing a part, you see, and although she's playing it quite well, that won't stop everyone from pointing out that she's doing Meryl Streep doing Anna Wintour:

Have you heard about a little site called Wikipedia? Aged gossip Cindy Adams has, and she doesn't like what she sees. It seems her Wikipedia page is filled with all sorts of "inaccuracies," which were placed there by "a ragtag assortment of contributors." So she did what most people do when they spot mistakes on Wikipedia: She dialed up company founder Jimmy Wales to demand that he edit her page. Unfortunately, Cindy reports today, Jimmy has thus far failed to correct the mistake. "He ultimately agreed to a re-edit. That was two months ago. He did nothing. So much for the truth." And so much for teaching 78-year-olds how to use the Internet.

• Jennifer Aniston is either back with John Mayer and maybe asking for his hand in marriage because of a> "a barrage of romantic emails from him "(Star), b> her pregnancy with his love child just like in those pictures or c> an insatiable need to look insane in the tabloids.

Former Morgan Stanley co-president Zoe Cruz is back. Or she might be! Demonstrating once again that timing is not her forte, she's now thinking about "possibly raising money to start a hedge fund." Or she might just take another job at big company because "she enjoyed being a high-level manager at a large prestigious firm." A large prestigious firm? Those don't exist anymore, silly! [TheStreet via Dealbreaker]

♦ Hugh Jackman has reportedly gone into contract on a triplex apartment at 176 Perry Street for more than $25 million. The 11,032-square-foot spread, which was originally listed for $40 million and later dropped to $33 million in April, is owned by Sun Microsystems co-founder Bill Joy. [NYO]
♦ Tech exec/art collector Roy Judelson and his wife Mary paid $10.5 mil. for a four-bedroom spread at 33 East 70th Street. Their new neighbors will include Joan Didion and Marina Rust Connor. [Cityfile]
♦ Now that he's settling in at 15 CPW, Dan Loeb has put his carriage house at 7 MacDougal Alley on the market for $7 million. The 4,000-square-foot home features a roof deck, media room, and wine cellar. [Curbed]