Just a note for myself, a list of interesting Python tools for my next web scraping project:

• urllib2: extensible library for opening URLs
• PyQuery: jQuery-like traversing and selecting for Python
• mechanize: stateful programmatic web browsing in Python
• Beautiful Soup: not supported/maintained that much anymore. Latest versions are rather slow and buggy
• Scrapy: looks nice, includes the URL requesting part as well, with cookie support and such
• lxml.html: lxml is a Pythonic binding for the libxml2 and libxslt libraries

Probably going with Scrapy.