the_time doesn’t work that way, but try sending in a the_date call with time specific formatting ..
I tried with the_date() first, but it only shows once if a day has more than one posts. The trick is to use get_the_time(). Sorry for not searching more carefully before posting.
its unclear to me if you figured out your issue or not, but to use the_date like a variable you need to set one of the arguments to false so it won’t send it to the screen.. see here:
http://codex.wordpress.org/Template_Tags/the_date
I needed to do it once and used something like:
<?php $current_date = the_date('', '', '', FALSE);?>
