Well, my thought was more like this (sorry I forgot to explicitly mention HTML):

<dd><span class="datetime"><span class="time">02:44 am</span></span><span class="poster entry-poster empty"></span><span class="access-filter">
<img src="http://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/entry/locked.png" title="" alt="protected" height="16" width="16"></span>
<h3 class="entry-title">
<a title="Welcome new inner Circlers..." href="http://marahmarie.dreamwidth.org/xxxxx.html">Welcome new inner Circlers...</a>
</h3> <b><span class="commentcount>- 4 </span></b><br>

Last span would be the new HTML, while the CSS would be .commentcount. I'm not forgetting anything in there, I hope.

Paragraph tags are leaving me less than excited because semantics - and I'm thinking inline-blocking for any count you want on the same line as tag name, comment title (but .echi covers this now, I believe), and so on, but IMO p tags are OK, as long as we get more finely targeted HTML/CSS to work with. :)