"take claim"

[Charles Doyle]

On last night's "Sixty Minutes," the feature about congressional "earmarks" for pork spending, was this:

And angry Republican congressman from Pennsylvania declares, "I'm proud to take claim for this earmark."

As far as I'm aware, I'd never previously heard the (blended?) idiom "take claim for," but it has 12,400 raw Google hits.

--Charlie

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