The Actionscript 3 DisplayObject behaves in such a manner that if it is in front of another object mouse enabled behaviours on the lower object will not me mouse accessible. This is quite useful and on occasion I have used a simple technique of creating a transparent Movieclip or Sprite and toggled the visible property or just removed it from the display stack.
I remember this because I had to dig deep to temember a time when the way to do this was to create a MovieClip and within it have an invisible button where you set the useHandCursor to false. The good ole days of Actionscript 2.0