problems with  character

[jdonnell]

I have a mysql database with characters like      » in it. I'm
trying to write a python script to remove these, but I'm having a
really hard time.

These strings are coming out as type 'str' not 'unicode' so I tried to
just

record[4].replace('Â', '')

but this does nothing. However the following code works

#!/usr/bin/python

s = 'aaaaa  aaa'
print type(s)
print s
print s.find('Â')

This returns
<type 'str'>
aaaaa  aaa
6

The other odd thing is that the  character shows up as two spaces if
I print it to the terminal from mysql, but it shows up as  when I
print from the simple script above. 
What am I doing wrong?