ThinkProgress continues to do good work on the Trayvon Martin story, this time with a post debunking untruths that right-wing sites have been spreading about Martin. Here's the first one:

Twitchy, a new website run by prominent conservative blogger Michelle Malkin, promoted a photo — purportedly from Martin’s Facebook page — that shows Martin in saggy pants and flipping the bird. The photo, which spread quickly on conservative websites and Twitter, is intended to paint Martin as a thug. As Twitchy later acknowledged, it is not a photo of Trayvon Martin.

Go read the whole post, please. The right-wing media machine has been hard at work trying to retroactively paint a dead teenager as someone who deserved to be killed*. I'm not directing you to this ThinkProgress post as a way to score points in the conservative vs. liberal debate that's always raging across the internet. I'm directing you to the post because you might encounter one of these lies in your daily life—an e-mail from a relative, say, or a post by an acquaintance on Facebook—and I want you to help stop this shameful smear campaign by spreading the truth. The national conversation simply has to be better than this.

* There's a greater question, here: Even if that photo was of Trayvon Martin—even if he posed in his own bedroom with baggy pants, flipping the bird at a camera, acting stupid the way rebellious teenage boys often do—would that make it okay to shoot and kill him?