Huck's soap war

I can't believe I missed this six weeks ago. Saturday is slow, so I'll do it now.

Is Huckabee sounding more an more like the Republican's John Edwards - playing around with plastic banana populism, or is just another target of the mathematically challenged Left? Ungh, time to take on Matthey Yglesias from (shock! I read it) The Atlantic, and his brain feed Tom Lee from Manifest Destiny.

First, let's look at the seed of this folly. From David Brooks we learn,

He was the first male in his family’s history to graduate from high school. He paid his way through college by working 40 hours a week and getting a degree in two and half years. He tells audiences that the only soap his family could afford was the rough Lava soap, and that he was in college before he realized showering didn’t have to hurt. “There are people paying $150 for an exfoliation,” he jokes. “I could just hand them a bar of Lava soap.”

Good 'ole Matt came off the top rope,

Mike Huckabee waxes populist, he "tells audiences that the only soap his family could afford was the rough Lava soap, and that he was in college before he realized showering didn’t have to hurt. 'There are people paying $150 for an exfoliation,' he jokes. 'I could just hand them a bar of Lava soap.'" David Brooks and I eat it up, but Tom Lee points out the truth: Lava soap is more expensive than regular soap.

And what top level "new math" math did Tom do?

Anyway what's this bullshit about it being cheap? Lava is a highly specialized utility soap, and one would expect it to command a premium. Clearly, this calls for some internet research. I compared prices for Lava versus Irish Spring — a nice, middle-of-the-road soap used by right-thinking Americans such as myself. A NOTE ON METHODOLOGICAL RIGOR: Lava is mostly sold as single bars. On the web, Irish Spring tends to be sold in 3-packs, so I've divided its prices by the number of bars. Surely a hardscrabble, cost-conscious family like the Huckabees would've bought in bulk.

	Lava	Irish Spring
Drugstore.com	$1.99	$0.88
Amazon	$1.40	$0.81
CVS	Only sells patriotic soap	$0.83
Rite-Aid	Only sells body wash, apparently.

The best price I could find for Lava was on Amazon — if you buy the 48-pack you can get it for $0.89/bar. But that's still more expensive than retail amounts of Irish Spring, and the package is suspiciously green. If you're really looking for budget soap you can do considerably better than that. Or you could simply pass horse urine through straw and mix with lard. You do slaughter your own pigs, don't you?

Silly rabbit, math is for kids!

Uhhhh. Let's go to Amazon.com and use the calculator widget on our Dashboard. I don't have time to make a fancy table like Tommy boy - so review your Hooked on Phonics and follow me a bit.

LAVA:
I can get you 48 4oz bars of Lava Soap (by WD-40, who knew?) for $42.83. 48x4 is 192oz. That comes to 4.48 oz per dollar. Usually it is found for a bit more, not often less.

IVORY:
I can get you a 12-pack 4.5oz bars for $13.38. To get you 48 bars it will cost you (no bulk discount beyond a dozen, sorry) for $53.52. 48x4.5 is 216oz. That comes to 4.03 oz per dollar. If I can get you off the number "48" and have you focus on just oz/$ then:
---96 3.1oz bars for $53.70. That gives you 288.3oz at 5.56 oz per dollar. This stuff gets messy fast.

IRISH SPRING:
I can get you a 12 pack of 4oz bars for $15.99. To get you 48 bars it will cost you (still no bulk discount, the Communists) $63.96. 48x4 is 192oz. That comes to 3.00 oz per dollar. Just to show you to never buy the first car you drive, I can get you 20 4.5oz bars for $14.95. That gives you 90oz of the green goodie for 6.02 oz per dollar. There is also a way to get 14 4.5oz bars for $12.99, bringing in 63oz of the cheap, "make my skin all ashy" stuff at 4.84oz per dollar.

Do we really need to be doing this? Lava is about average - and without the Sears catalog from the 1950s, I have no idea how expensive the stuff was then. And BTW, if you have ever been raised in a male centric, working class house - Lava may just be what you get, as to quote Papa Salamander, "Just use the d@man soap I do, and don't forget to wipe your tail this time Skiddy...."

How about we call it even. I don't know what company store the Huckabees shopped at - but this is chump-change compared to some of the crap that Hillary has put out in whatever accent she is using on that day.

I am not a great fan of Gov. Huck - but you need to try harder than this. Try again. Only in the USA can politicians get in trouble due to soap. The French must be very confused right now.

One last note. Speaking of soap and the French; what does the Salamander household recommend? Once you go Savon de Marseille, you never go back.