Ok please excuse this total newb question but are you able to use any type of cheap dish washing soap or detergent (or just rubbing alcohol) to clean the mr. beer brewing barrel and bottles? I ask this because I want to brew cider and will not be buying the kits from mr.brew (so I do not have any one-step)

A lot of folks use Oxyclean Free. It is free of any fragrance and is a great cleaner.

The liquid or gel form? and do you just pour it in with a bit of water and scrub? We are talking about the laundry deturgent stuff right?

the laundry stuff, should be a white power.

The important thing is that it's the free (green lid).

Do not use isopropanol (alcohol) on plastics! True there are some harder plastics that it may not harm but as a general not, no isopropanol on plastics.
Cleaning and sanitizing are two separate steps. Surfaces must be cleaned before they can be sanitized.
As a cleaner oxy-clean free is great and fine to use on most surfaces (don't use on anything tethlon coated). I used to use alcohol on my stainless for quick, on-the-fly sanitizing, but heard on Brew Strong that the contact time before evaporation isn't sufficient to sanitize.
One step is a sanitizer. It will sanitize surfaces after they have been cleaned. StarSan is also a preferred sanitizer. They are both " no rinse" sanitizers. The correct proportion of bleach and water "can" be used as a no rinse sanitizer, but onestep and starsan are cheap. If you are going to be brewing/fermenting, I would suggest that you pick some up.

Pick up a bottle of star san. It's concentrated, last forever
and you will not have to worry about off flavors from soap.

You want to make sure anything you clean with has no scents added (not even as cover up). Which is why the Oxy Free stuff is awesome.

For sanitizing, it really is best to get a tub of OneStep or a jug of StarSan from a local or online homebrew shop.

For (most likely) readily available, effective and cheap no rinse sanitizer, you can use a mixture of water, bleach and vinegar. (some care needs to be taken, as you should not mix straight bleach and vinegar).

"March 29, 2007 - Sanitizing with Bleach and Star San
Charlie Talley from Five Star Chemicals tells us best practices in using household bleach and Star San in sanitizing equipment."
basic-brewing-radio-2007

Well I have started my brew of hard cider using cascade complete dishwasher detergent (because I actually could not find any of the above cleaners, except bleach which sounds dangerous) used nottingham danstar brewing yeast and 2.5 gal of whitehouse 100% apple juice. I scrubbed the heck out of the inside of my mini brew keg with cascade the rinsed it out for a good 30 min....should that be good?...Can't wait for these 3 weeks to be up (crosses fingers).