Can't clear non-blank empty cells

See the attached worksheet. What I WANT to do is, in columns A and B, do an Edit/GoTo/Special/Blanks, CtrlEnter to select all, =, up arrow, enter to paste the value above in all of the blank cells. The problem is all of my blank cells appear to be non-blank. I've tried using the TRIM function on them, the CLEAN function, copy and paste as values, etc. Can anyone help me to replace the non-empty blank cells with empty blank cells? Thanks in advance.