Modifying the twitter action stream to retain the tweet's tweet_author field

So, I wanted to modify the twitter action stream so that I could retain the user name of the particular twitter persona I was tweeting under. Such tweets would read something like:

As Innovators, Bud tweeted "yada".

I read the material on services and streams and examined the special class that the twitter stream uses to construct the tweet. It seemed that tweets and favorites used the same base Twitter class for processing with only slight differences in the subclasses. In particular, it seemed to me that I ought to be able to use the TwitterFavorites instead of TwitterTweets to process tweets and get the desired behavior. TwitterFavorites retains the tweet's author in a field called tweet_author for later use in the template. But, no go. It does not work.

Anyone have any ideas for how to achieve a behavior where the tweet author is maintained.

Thanks,
Bud