Resolved!!! I needed to clean up the class issue slightly. The event issue came down to Karl's ($event.target)issue PLUS USING MOUSEOVER AND NOT MOUSEENTER.
The reference guide DOES describe it properly; I am just thick-headed, I guess. Mouseover will fire when entering over a child. Mouseout will not. We had to use mouseover because mouseenter was operating on Senate but not firing when entering Senate's descendant, placemark. That's the first half. The second half is the $(event.target). The best way to describe this is to say it means, "Whatever your mouse is on at the most inner level. You might be in library, in book, on page 23, and event.target reports page 23 and not book or library. So, we use $(event.target) to change style of the descendant, even though it is encapsulated by the parent. If the mouseover was on a part of parent that did NOT contain child, parent is reported as event.target. If you are sitting on a descendant, descendant is reported as event.target. Click works the same. If you don't want the click on a child to do whatever a click on its parent would do, then, in the $(parent).click (), test to be sure event.target!=this. If it does not, do nothing but return. These are VERY IMPORTANT distinctions that should be known and emphasized more than they are. I hope I described them well, and I hope others have gained from this. Now, I get to move to the next level of functionality in my app. Woohoo! Thanks, everyone, and special thanks to Andrei and Karl for putting real time into helping me sort this out. Karl nailed it and gets the trophy!
