newbie needs help with cookielib

[Sells, Fred]

I'm using Python 2.4 and 2.7 for different apps.  I'm happy with a
solution for either one.

I've got to talk to a url that uses a session cookie.  I only need to
set this when I'm developing/debugging so I don't need a robust
production solution and I'm somewhat confused by the docs on cookielib.
I can use urllib2 without cookielib just fine, but need the cookie to
add some security.

I'm normally using Firefox 4.0 to login to the server and get the
cookie.  After that I need some way to set the same cookie in my python
script.  I can do this by editing my code, since I only need it while
defeloping from my test W7 box.


I was hoping to find something like

...set_cookie('mycookiename', 'myvalue', 'mydomain.org')

I've googled this most of the morning and found everything but what I
need, or I just don't understand the basic concept.  Any pointers would
be greatly appreciated.  One of my false starts looks like this. But I
get a 

...
  File "C:\alltools\python26\lib\urllib2.py", line 518, in
http_error_default
    raise HTTPError(req.get_full_url(), code, msg, hdrs, fp)
urllib2.HTTPError: HTTP Error 500: Access Deinied

def test1():
    cj = cookielib.MozillaCookieJar()
    cj.load('C:/Users/myname/Desktop/cookies.txt')
    opener = urllib2.build_opener(urllib2.HTTPCookieProcessor(cj))
    r = opener.open("http://daffyduck.mydomain.org/wsgi/myapp.wsgi")   
    print r.read() 
    return