'I had to subclass the urllib2.HTTPCookieProcessor in order to add the
"if request.cookies" to provide the plugins with a feature to send HTTP
requests without any cookies.'

def http_request(self, request):

    if request.cookies:
        try:
            return urllib2.HTTPCookieProcessor.http_request(self, request)
        except AttributeError:
            return request
    return request
