Generate pagination controls without <a> tags

[aaronbushnell]

I'd like to customize the generated pagination more. Currently, the generated pagination looks like this:

<ol class="flex-control-nav flex-control-paging">
    <li><a class="flex-active">1</a></li>
    <li><a>2</a></li>
    <li><a>3</a></li>
</ol>

I'd like to just remove the <a> tags and display something like this:

<ol class="flex-control-nav flex-control-paging">
    <li class="flex-active">1</li>
    <li>2</li>
    <li>3</li>
</ol>

I could use the manualControls option, but that would require me to manually create the DOM for the controls which I'd prefer to avoid. Any suggestions without hacking the core?

[aaronbushnell]

Also, because of issue #593 I can't use manualControls with jQuery 1.9+.