I recommend pythonz which is a fork of pythonbrew https://github.com/saghul/pythonz
Also there is a known problem with python2.6 and recent openssl distribution. I'm using this command/tarball:
pythonz install 2.6.8 --url=https://bitbucket.org/schmichael/cpython-v2.6.8-nosslv2/get/v2.6.8~nosslv2.tar.gz