urllib.urlopen question

[grok korg]

Dear pythonistas,
my software needs to talk to a daemon on a port, like this:
    http://www.daemonmachine.gov:9999

Extra parameters are supposed to be passed like this:
    http://www.daemonmachine.gov:9999/qmethod=q&param=tsu%20wa

This is how you can talk to the daemon in the browser --
just enter the URL as seen above. Please note, that this is
NOT as one might expect from a cgi-script, there is no "?"
involved. The parameters get passed just like a subdir or
a filename would. Anyways, if I use urlopen with such an
URL:
  uh=urllib.urlopen("http://www.daemonmachine.gov:9999/qmethod=q&param=tsu%20wa"
or
  uh=urllib.urlopen("http://www.daemonmachine.gov:9999"
        , "qmethod=q&param=tsu%20wa")

nothing happens. I don't get any data. Maybe my understanding of
the POST/GET-mechanism is bogus here, I don't know. 
Any ideas, people?

Thanks, regards
G*