This is necessary, and simple. 

See:http://aspn.activestate.com/ASPN/Cookbook/Python/Recipe/146306
There should be 0 politics about the lack of this.

In response to this if there is some reason you cannot
include this code directly into urllib (most likely),
please tell me what I can do within the time frame of
my reply to 1 email response to get this code included
into the python libraries immediately.