It is now possible to use RSS Bandit to read protected Live Journal feeds now that they support HTTP authentication. Brad Fitzpatrick wrote
Digest auth for RSS
Aparently this was never announced:
http://www.livejournal.com/users/USER/data/rss?auth=digest
Get RSS feeds (including protected entries) by authenticating with HTTP Digest Auth. Good for aggregators.
Good indeed. Given that I agitated for this in a previous post I'd like to thank the LiveJournal folks for implementing this feature.