You can definitely make REST API calls directly from Python. Not sure if you have Python 2.x or 3.x but ih 2.x you can use httplib as in the attached example (also copied below) that shows tweeting a message:
url = "/1.1/statuses/update.json"
message = 'Playing with Python and the Supertweet API'
# base64 encode the username and password
auth = base64.encodestring('%s:%s' % (username, password)).replace('\n', '')
body = urllib.urlencode({'status': message})
webservice = httplib.HTTP(host)
webservice.putrequest("POST", url)
webservice.putheader("Host", host)
webservice.putheader("User-Agent", "Python http auth")
webservice.putheader("Content-type", "application/x-www-form-urlencoded")
webservice.putheader("Content-length", "%d" % len(body))
# write the Authorization header like: 'Basic base64encode(username + ':' + password)
webservice.putheader("Authorization", "Basic %s" % auth)
statuscode, statusmessage, header = webservice.getreply()
print "Response: ", statuscode, statusmessage
print "Headers: ", header
res = webservice.getfile().read()