it sort of does, though. Trying to use urllib2 is like pulling teeth
>>> import httplib, json
>>> conn = httplib.HTTPConnection("httpbin.org")
>>> conn.request("GET", "/get")
>>> res = conn.getresponse()
>>> print res.status, res.reason
200 OK
>>> data = json.load(res)
>>> print data
{u'origin': '0.0.0.0', ...}
>>> conn.close()
[1] https://docs.python.org/2.7/library/httplib.html#examples