Using a command line curl in this way from python is completely not acceptable. You should not relay on any command line tools availability and what is more, calling a unix process on request response is terribly slow and it is last thing I would do.

You should definitely use urllib2 or python "requests" lib (which is awesome) to make any HTTP call directly from python.

Anyway - can you tell why do you need to make this http call? Maybe it is not needed?