And Chris Matthews looks on grinning, asking, “What’s the issue?”

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It looks like long-time TV critic Roger Ebert deserves two thumbs up for garnering the top punditry prize in the nation from Forbes magazine. What exactly does that mean? Well! It means that out of all the talking heads you see and read each day, he’s the best of the best. Apparently.

Ebert beat out some really loud people you might have thought to be shoe-ins in such a battle of brawn. Bill Maher was ranked second, followed by FOX News’ king Bill O’Reilly; Senate candidate Al Franken; TV “journalist” Geraldo Rivera; Rosie O’Donnell; film critic Leonard Maltin; legal commentator Greta Van Susteren; CNN news commentator Lou Dobbs; and basketball analyst Bill Walton.

Jesse Jackson, Sean Hannity and Keith Olbermann were among near misses for the top ten.

Interestingly, liberal Web pundits like Markos Moulitsas of Daily Kos and Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo scored high “likability ratings” with certain population segments, but their awareness numbers, which are more important than appeal, according to the Forbes polling team, were “barely on the radar screen.”

The same is largely true of elite, but popular, newspaper columnists like Thomas Friedman, Maureen Dowd, and Robert Novak.

So! What to take away from all this? Grab some popcorn, stow your politics and start watchin’ some movies.

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“When you have to make a secret trip to Iraq, I think, probably, your surge plan isn’t working,” HBO’s Bill Maher said on Chris Matthews’ Hardball this evening, referring to President Bush’s weekend visit to the devastated war-plagued country.

“He’s not a reader,” Maher said of Bush. “He didn’t think he had to learn anything about Iraq…He prayed on it.”

The political commentator/comedian added that he couldn’t stand to see Fred Thompson or Rudy Giuliani in the White House because he feels they view the world much too simply, much like Maher thinks Bush views the world.

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Amy Holmes - a GOP strategist, a former aide to ex-Republican Senate leader Bill Frist, and a talking head often seen on FOX News - made a couple of surprising revelations while co-hosting The View today: She is registered as an Independent and is adamantly pro-choice – even though she’s said she’s Republican in the past.

So, why does the Black Entertainment Television personality tout conservative values, while espousing some pretty liberal views in private?

“Because she quickly learned as an African American woman today what would be the quickest route to air-time,” an associate of Holmes told Big Head DC this morning. “She definitely wouldn’t have been hosting The View today, if she was a liberal.”

No party line, it seems, will hold the 33-year-old Holmes back in her quest for fame. She’s said in the past that she’d like to have her own television program like Charlie Rose, has appeared as one of People magazine’s “50 Most Beautiful,” and, we’re told, worked her sources hard to score an appearance on Bill Maher’s program in April.

“I love photo shoots,” Holmes, who once dated the former Reliable Source writer Lloyd Grove, told her alma mater’s newspaper in 2000. “I understand now why celebrities get addicted.”

But who knew that becoming addicted to the GOP would get a gal everything she ever wanted?

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