List-style Paragrah Reordering

[Laemeur]

In Org-mode, reordering items in a list is a piece of cake with the 
Meta-Shift-up/down binding: the current list item swaps places with the item 
above or below, and point keeps its position relative to the current line. I 
would like to be able to do this with paragraphs/lines of text as well, but 
Meta-Shift-up/down only works this way on tables, lists, and headings by 
default.

I would really appreciate any help in configuring Emacs to do this. Hopefully 
it's a relatively simple thing to do. 

Thanks very kindly,
-L