Requests doesn't have an equivalent to Urlib2's read().
>>> import requests
>>> response = requests.get("http://www.google.com")
>>> print response.content
'<!doctype html><html itemscope="" itemtype="http://schema.org/WebPage"><head>....'
>>> print response.content == response.text
True
It looks like the POST request you are making is returning no content. Which is often the case with a POST request. Perhaps it set a cookie? The status code is telling you that the POST succeeded after all.
Edit for Python 3:
Python now handles data types differently. response.content returns a sequence of bytes (integers that represent ASCII) while response.text is a string (sequence of chars).
Thus,
>>> print response.content == response.text
False
>>> print str(response.content) == response.text
True