Here's a hideous looking one-liner that will pull the json out of that particular response and put it in a dict.
d = json.loads(r.text.split("=")[1].replace("'", '"')[:-1])
It's pulling the json itself out of the javascript statement, replacing the single-quotes with double-quotes (because the json module won't accept single-quotes), and then feeding it the json module.
Edit As pointed out by Hugh Bothwell, using ast.literal_eval
instead of the json module avoids the single-quote issue, so you're left with
d = ast.literal_eval(r.text.split("=")[1].strip(" ;"))
The .strip(" ;")
Will strip the ';' off the end and the whitespace from the beginning.