OK, in case somebody else has similar needs as me, I found a partial workaround for now:  I set the background color, text color and border color all to the same value.  So, now, the flags appear, but the text next to them (that contains the visitor counts, etc.) is not visible to anyone.  I also changed the href code to point back to my site and have bookmarked the original href site so that I can still visit it for my stats, but my visitors can't click on the image to be taken to my stats.  You can see how my hack of the widget looks by visiting http://blogannath.blogspot.com/  .  Thank you.