I suggest ElementTree. There are other compatible implementations of the same API, such as lxml, and cElementTree in the Python standard library itself; but, in this context, what they chiefly add is even more speed -- the ease of programming part depends on the API, which ElementTree defines.

First build an Element instance root from the XML, e.g. with the XML function, or by parsing a file with something like:

import xml.etree.ElementTree as ET
root = ET.parse('thefile.xml').getroot()

Or any of the many other ways shown at ElementTree. Then do something like:

for type_tag in root.findall('bar/type'):
    value = type_tag.get('foobar')
    print(value)

Output:

1
2

Before I try to answer, a tip. Your exception handler covers up the nature of the problem. Just let the original exception rise up and you'll have more information to share with people who are interested in helping you.

I like to use feedparser to parse Atom feeds. It does indeed give you dict-like objects. I submitted a patch to feedparser 4.1 to parse the GeoRSS elements into GeoJSON style dicts. See https://code.google.com/p/feedparser/issues/detail?id=62 and blog post at http://sgillies.net/blog/566/georss-patch-for-universal-feedparser/. You'd use it like this:

>>> import feedparser
>>> feed = feedparser.parse("http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/catalogs/1hour-M1.xml")
>>> feed.entries[0]['where']
{'type': 'Point', 'coordinates': (-122.8282, 38.844700000000003)}

My patched version of 4.1 is in my Dropbox and you can get it using pip.

$ pip install http://dl.dropbox.com/u/10325831/feedparser-4.1-georss.tar.gz

Or just download and install with "python setup.py install".