Browsing about the blogosphere tonight, I passed through Rick's Cafe Americain, and noticed a spiffy feature that caught the eye of the web-development bear in me. Atop Rick's page, he displays a rapidly cycling counter --- similar to those old "national debt" ones you used to see --- which reads "Cost of the War In Iraq".

The counter shows around $84,210,061,103 right now, and it zooms upward as you read this.

Not to be outdone, I thought I'd show off my own web widget chops, and add a nice auto-updating counter of my own. Here goes:

Someday, maybe I'll let y'all in on the secret of how I coded that...

Update: To his great credit, Rick at Cafe Americain has a well-reasoned, civil response to my little snark up at his place. I don't agree with everything he says, but it is well worth reading. The phrase "loyal opposition" leaps to mind: for me, this post marks Rick as a sane voice of the left that I'll return to in the future...