NO OS PERDÁIS este perfil en NRO de Roger Simon, escritor y guionista de Los Angeles, con una de las bitácoras más inteligentes de la blogosfera, y un buen amigo:

From the 1960s until somewhat recently, Simon was a radical left-winger who supported every trendy cause of the era: the civil-rights movement, Vietnam War protests, the Black Panthers, Latin American revolutions, Chairman Mao, Fidel Castro. He hobnobbed with other leftist writers and frequently traveled to Communist countries.

His first big break as a struggling novelist came with The Big Fix, featuring lead character Moses Wine, a one-time hippie turned private eye who exuded a hip, liberal attitude and dealt with the hot-button social issues of the day.

At a time when most other crime writers were still mired in pale Philip Marlowe knock-offs, Simon's radical twist appealed to '70s Hollywood, which was then engrossed in subverting traditional genres much as Simon had done with his novel.

Simon penned the script for the movie version, which starred Richard Dreyfuss, and his screenwriting career took off. In 1989 Simon earned a best-screenplay Oscar nomination for Enemies: A Love Story, based on an Isaac Bashevis Singer novel.

Nowadays, however, this lanky, genial writer with many hats (and one favored fedora, in which he is pictured on his website) is better known for yet another career. With over 200,000 visitors a month, he's rapidly become one of the most popular political bloggers on the Internet.

Simon's somewhat glamorous background helped in the beginning. "It gave me a leg up on the average blogger," he says. But what really turned heads was his remarkable political transformation — from a former radical leftist into a die-hard Bush supporter. His blog entries make frequent mention of his own amazement at this 180-degree change of heart.

[...] Despite his avid support for Bush's reelection, though, Simon doesn't consider himself a conservative. In fact, he hates ideological labels. "They're just an excuse not to think," he declares.

On foreign policy and defense, Simon is a fierce hawk. On economic issues, he says, "I am puzzled. I'm more pro-market than I was. I'm pro-free trade, pro-NAFTA. Socialism has failed. There's no denying it; it's empirical. "

But when it comes to social policy, he continues to lean hard to the left. "I'm very liberal on social issues: pro-gay marriage, pro-choice, separation of church and state," he says. "I think racism and sexism are the greatest evils in the world."

Congratulations, Roger!