Happy birthday, Hawaii!

If you don't know how many states are in the United States, here's an easy way to remember. This Friday marks exactly 50 years since America added its final, 50th, state: Hawaii.

The country was ready: the growing availability of air travel in the 1960s made Hawaii a popular vacation spot for those who could afford it. Those who couldn't were soon fascinated by the vivid imagery of the TV crime series Hawaii Five-O, named for Hawaii being the 50th state. Its opening sequence has to be one of the greatest of all time.

Visitors to the islands — five to six hours by air from Los Angeles — are still greeted as they were on TV, by Hawaiians in grass skirts putting a lei, or necklace of flowers, around their neck.

With its rainforests, live volcanoes, unusual animals, very large telescopes, and flowers in all colors of the rainbow, Hawaii is a very exotic place. To some, it's more a state of mind than a state of the U.S.

American commercial interests had fought hard to gain control of what, until 1893, had been the independent Kingdom of Hawaii. In that year, they overthrew the queen — an act for which President Clinton and Congress apologized in 1993 — and the resulting power vacuum led to Hawaii being annexed by the United States in 1898 without any kind of treaty. Today, several organizations, such as the Hawaiian Kingdom Government, are trying to restore sovereignty to the "occupied" islands by complaining to the United Nations (which won't hear their case).

Hawaii's place on American maps, inside a little box in the corner, next to Alaska, makes it seem like an afterthought. In fact, Hawaii had kind of fallen off the map, so to speak, until last year, when it became clear that Barack Obama was born there.

Well, it became clear to most people. Hawaii is now the focus of internet conspiracy theorists who strongly believe that Barack Obama is not qualified to be president because he is, somehow, not American. They typically make one or more of the following claims:

• Obama has not publicly produced the original birth certificate proving where he was born, but rather a copy from a later date.
• A Hawaiian newspaper announcement of his birth in 1961, like anything in print, is not to be trusted.
• Even if he was born there, Hawaii is too far away from the mainland to really count as part of America.

Never mind that Hawaii was American enough — even before it was a state — to get the U.S. into World War II. And for the record, Congress decided unanimously in 2008 that both Obama and his rival, John McCain — born in a U.S. colony, the Panama Canal Zone — counted as American citizens for the purpose of the election.

The "birth conspiracy theorists", commonly called "birthers", were far on the fringe last year, and nobody paid them much attention. Over the past several months, however, they have gained a lot of momentum by joining a growing rebellion against what they imagine to be Obama's secret plan — developed since his childhood — to turn the United States into a Muslim socialist nation in which black people will be made the ruling class.

Part one of his diabolical scheme is to allow people without health insurance to buy it. I'll tell you more about that next week.